Passing secrets in class

[muckefuck]

This opinion piece by fellow alum John Scalzi is sparking some interesting online discussions, particularly on the role of class. (Here's a thoughtful response from nihilistic_kid highlighting the importance of that factor.) One of these was in the Facebook feed of a friend, and a friend of hers made this interesting observation:

Upper class kids, especially those from academic families, view knowledge as something to be shared, and it is not just right but proper to defer to superior expertise. I think one of the most telling markers of class, honestly, is family recipes. If you ask someone from a lower class background about the recipe for some particular dish, nine times out of ten you'll get some waffle about my/mother's/grandmother's "secret recipe," with all the song and dance that sounds like something between the trade secrets of the medieval guilds and some occult mystery tradition. If you ask someone from an upper class background, this is invariably taken as an invitation to talk about themselves, their ancestry, or their travels, giving the provenance of the recipe, mentioning personal variations, and more often than not referring to "tricks" rather than "secrets," as the assumption is shared common knowledge rather than secrecy, and mentioning "tricks" is just a way to gauge a person's expertise. With that sort of worldview, it's not surprising that upper class kids have a leg up in academia because it comes out of the later tradition.

I'm interested in hearing how this does or doesn't jibe with the experiences of others here. My family background is pretty firmly middle class (though Dad's family was on the borderline, his father being a workman-cum-farmer) and the description of "upper class" behaviour sounds about right for us and our milieu. But I don't really have enough experience trading recipes with members of the "lower class" to speak to that part of it. Most of the working-class people I've chatted with about food have been recent immigrants and I think that skews the sample.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Alas, I can't contribute much data for you about the lower middle class. My mother hates cooking and hasn't passed on any recipes. Her mother was an excellent cook, but the kind that does a handful of this, pinch of that type cooking. We have identified the cookbook she mostly used, but haven't really been able to reproduce anything due to the fudge factor.

I saw the thread you are quoting from here, and wondered if the class divide weren't really about foodies vs. non-foodies rather than a sense of secrecy per se. If you ask me or my sister for a recipe, we'll write it up and turn it over with no fanfare, whereas my hubby the chef likes to discuss provenance and mods, etc., at length. (And yes, he is from a higher socio-economic class than I am.)

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Hm, interesting post from nihlistic_kid (but the link needs fixing). His comment about Southern whites being paid less than Northern blacks is interesting, but I suspect it was precisely the differential, even more than the average amount, that is psychologically rewarding for whites.

I have been spending quite a lot of time with some very poor white people lately and I think this attitude towards knowledge - shared vs. hoarded - is just a special case of a very broad kind of privilege, which is the privilege of "not having to care". Upper class people can afford to be generous because they are not accustomed to having to fight tooth and nail for every last advantage just to squeak by. Hoarding and competitive behavior also seems associated with having a lot of siblings, and people who grew up having to compete for food at the dinner table seem permanently imprinted by that experience. (Perhaps that's why recipes are such a good example.)

Generosity is seen as a virtue, so of course those who cannot or don't believe they can afford it are seen as less virtuous by those who can. I can't call recipe-hoarding a vice but it probably is much less necessary than it seems.

It's sort of unbelievable how much energy goes into different kinds of psychological game-playing among people who can afford it the least. I find some lower class whites to be almost pathologically defensive of their honor, and this is the source of all kinds of woo-woo ranging from secret recipes to outright occult manipulation.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Interesting observations, and a logical conclusion about generosity vis-à-vis badly needed and jealously guarded advantage. I will need to ponder them at greater length to figure out how to reconcile it with my own observations in two jobs I held (1, 2) that involved bidirectional class-divergent interaction: I found that privileged rich upper class individuals tended to be niggardly, and underprivileged poor lower class individuals tended to be generous. But this was in terms of material goods and money, not recipes or other knowledge.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in looking at that study from the 70s. The question I was left with was, "Are regional variations in the cost-of-living being accounted for?" In other words, the Southerners may have been making less money in absolute terms, but since cost-of-living and purchasing power varies in different parts of the country (just look at gas prices), were they really worse off, comparatively? I would suspect the variation would have less to do with the presence/absence of unions and more to do with the presence/absence of industry.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Wow. I don't have an answer to your question, but I am fascinated (in a good way) at Recipe Road, the unmapped, unsigned, hidden-so-well-it's-practically-invisible side street the conversation about that Scalzi piece has been steered onto!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Also, I found this link to be interesting. The narrative of "poor people are poor because they have stupid habits" is something that can be seen to counter the "lacking privilege" angle, but my take on it is that upper class habits are the upper-class privilege. It's a feedback loop that keeps rich people rich and keeps poor people poor. The mistake is believing that you can freely choose your habits through a simple act of will, when in fact most of them are a matter of environmental feedback.

I think that class is always the most proximate driver of inequality, but when class is correlated with any other arbitrary factor "x", having "x" tends to drive you into the corresponding class, further reenforcing the correlation. When x = race the effect is particularly strong.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

upper class habits are the upper-class privilege. It's a feedback loop that keeps rich people rich and keeps poor people poor.

This. And not only is it a feedback loop from within, but it is also assisted from without since it is in the decided interest of the rich to keep themselves rich-and-getting-richer and to keep the poor poor-and-getting-poorer.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for the multiple edits; LJ and YT aren't playing nicely, as it seems)

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I've been reading Kate Fox's book Watching the English which presents itself as an anthropological study of the English. I don't think it has the rigor to really be that, but she does say some interesting things about class. In England*, at least, class is not tied all that tightly to income or even wealth. It's connected to cultural signifiers. She mentions a lot of little tricks the English use to determine class (vocabulary, the state of one's home/car, etc.). A working class guy who makes a fortune is still working class in outlook. An upper class guy who works as a janitor is still culturally upper class. Both can have class pride. It's an interesting way of looking at class that I had never considered before. I think your discussion of knowledge/recipes fits that vein. Since class is not tied directly to money, we use these signifiers to help us identify fellow travelers (or dismiss others as snobs/slobs).

*One of the flaws of her book is that she dismisses the idea of a British culture fairly quickly, arguing that Britain is merely a political construct. The English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish may share cultural traits, but are distinct cultures with no over-riding identity.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Why is that a "flaw"? This is something I've heard from almost everyone in the British Isles, whether Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, or what-have-you: There is no "British" identity. It's like saying there's some common "EU" identity.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

It's a flaw that she dismisses it in one line in the introduction. Just because people profess there's no common identity doesn't mean it isn't the case in practice. Increasingly, new immigrants are identifying as British. What do they see as Britishness? If pressed, would those English, Manx and Scottish agree or disagree?

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

Who cooks?

No, really -- who cooks? Yes, everyone eats, some even put food on the table, but cooking...

Hobbyists. People with spare time. People who make enough money within a household to allow a member of that household to "do cooking" and who don't make enough money to hire a cook or to eat in restaurants. Cooking-as-hobby has as a pre-requisite the investment of food with a more-than-fuel significance. This is shared-family-meal significance for some, the my-body-is-a-temple significance for others, the individuation-through-proclaimed-expertise significance for still others. (I cook for shared-family-meal reasons and to save money. Not that I could immediately turn hours spent in food shopping and preparation into cash; but I certainly can immediately make cash disappear by buying cooked food.)

Other people, non-hobby cooks, just eat.

The upper-class person eats in restaurants and goes to Waitrose / Marks & Spencer for any readymeals, the lower-class person goes to Aldi / Tesco / Iceland for readymeals and when in a can't-be-arsed-to-work-the-microwave mood pops into a chippie, a Tennessee Fried Chicken.

Neither the upper-class person nor the lower-class person has "family recipes". For them, other people do the cooking.

To have opinions on food, to know and to trade recipes, strikes me as a very middle-class characteristic.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

As I was telling my partner the other night, I spent part of my boyhood in a rural area and people absolutely had opinions about food there. The authorities they cited weren't Julia Child or Justin Wilson but revered relatives or people known in the local community. Every corn grower was convinced he knew the best variety of sweet corn for eating and the best way to cook it, but he might be too modest or retiring to get into a dispute over it.

Not all "working class" or "lower class" people are as alienated from the source of their food as your typical post-industrial city-dweller, and you don't have to be "middle class" to have a strong opinion on which fry shack has the best fried chicken or which smokehouse has the best barbecue.

[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

That was my boyhood, too. "Sparkle" strawberries. "Country Gentleman" white sweet corn. "Martha Washington" asparagus. And Mrs Heritage's lemon curd at church suppers, Mrs Carter's apple pie, Mrs Thompson's raised yeast rolls.

But that boyhood, mine, not yours!, is fifty years gone.

You move from "It was thus" to "It is thus". Is it? In Chicago, in Missouri? I can't say.

I think that I've given a faithful rendering of how things are now among the people I know in London.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Neither my academic middle-class nuclear family nor my lower-middle-class/workingclass/I'm-not-sure-what-the-boundary-is extended family do "secret recipes". I get the logic, but I suspect that the cultural institution of secret recipes is way too specific to support the argument being presented. I'm also suspicious of the highly specific characterizations of how working class and middle class people "invariably" behave.