Chestnut Tree Cafe

Chestnut Tree Cafe sets out a categorisation and interpretation of my personal food memories, ‘food stories’. The overall aim is to provide a demonstration of how individual preferences and social obligations are expressed at table through food cultures. The narrative is illustrative. Chestnut Tree Cafe is a walking through, negotiating with, encountering and embracing of food culture.

A la Carte displays a menu of ‘food events’ that make up my own food-cultural history. Each food is categorised by primary influences, context of consumption and ‘theme’. The stories of these food events are the Little Vitals (victuals) that have nourished me and are memory triggers to the people, places and thoughts of a life lived through the exploration of foods and cultures.

In A La Culture are set out the cultural influences, and their relationship to location and lifestyle, that have shaped my food habits today. Rather than reifying the concept of culture as in the postmodern tradition, Chestnut Tree Cafe takes a neo-Boasian approach by recognising the semi-permeable nature of cultural boundaries and will hopefully provide some interesting examples of the complexity and fluidity of cultural influences in a pluralist society and a how such influences can shape diet. The food stories are arranged in themes:

[Alpha and Omega  [Freedom & Security  [Luxury & Economy  [Plenty & Want  [Taste & Tradition

Themes are a way of organising disparate but related food stories over the years, lifecycle and geography of a life – mine in this instance but potentially anyone’s in a modern pluralist, and socially mobile, society. Traditional food patterns are those in which the food stories repeat and resonate with the behavioural codes of a region, religion, social class or indeed subculture – the green food habits established in the 1970s have now successfully brought up a generation many of whom are replicating the food habits of their parents with their own children. In a sense, Themes are mere aggregations whereas the meaningful categories are sub-themes relating as they do to particular cultural food events such as breakfast or broad food categories such as meat.

The first theme, Alpha & Omega symbolises for me some aspect of the nature of existence or the existence of nature. The second theme, Freedom & Security presents more peronal associations with food to explore the foundation of indiviudal food preference, and food-related phobias and other emotional associations with food. In Luxury & Economy I explore the highs and lows of consumption in a life spent mixing with plebs and professionals, punks and polite society, and on one occasion prostitutes and princes; Plenty & Want discusses under and over eating; and finally the Taste & Tradition theme deals with English foods and foods from other national cultures that have entered my life at one time or another. The selection of stories for themes reflects in part a particualr emphasis or perspective that can be loosely attribtued, post facto, to conventional ‘disciplines’ that make up the complexity of consumer research and food marketing – humanity, psychology, socio-economics, nutrition, anthropology.