Chapter 12 - Comic Books and the Culinary Logic of Late Capitalism

Summary

This chapter examines the relationship between food, violence, and capitalism in three comic book series on food, Get Jiro! and Get Jiro! Blood and Sushi, Starve, and Chew. I argue that in these series, which share a number of important themes and representational tropes, food as the symbol of nature, unsullied human existence, and truth, becomes a way to countenance the corrupting violence of capitalism. Food also serves as a symbol of an authentic human bond, one that is prior to and beyond capital. It stands as the basis of a critique of the violence of the contractual reason that is essential to capitalism. The protagonists, each of who is necessarily an outsider figure, have a profoundly ambivalent relationship to capitalism. Food has been a blessing and curse for each of them. It is a burden, yet also redeems them, just as each of them seeks to redeem food from the malevolent influence of capitalism. The world of food in these works embodies the contradictory logic of late capitalism, in which food culture and the chefs are both hyper-commodified and hyper-mediated yet are the source of critique and opposition to the very culture that produces them. Situating the food comic subgenre of comic books in the context of the recent global surge of interest in food culture and at the juncture of several traditions of representation, I consider the political implications of the critique that it offers about present-day market-mediated representations of food.