The semiotics and social agency of eating

People without babies (OK, me, before we had Helena) often mistake the real challenges of caring for an infant.  I had always imagined that "sleeping like a baby" had some basis in truth, for instance but teaching Helena Iara to sleep has been one of the most difficult challenges we have faced.  And food... we all need food, right?  People like to eat.  The problem with most Americans is that we eat too much, after all.  In fact, however, teaching Helena Iara to eat has also been a challenge.


The problem with food, as I explained to Helena a couple of days ago, seems to be more about semiotics than about taste.  Semiotics? you ask (and certainly Helena would have asked, could she speak).  The science of symbols?  What does that have to do with food?  Well, I explained to her, she had seen a spoon before, because we use it to give her medicine.  She doesn't like medicine, whether because it tastes bad or because it's associated with when her belly hurts, so the spoon has become a symbol associated with something she doesn't like.  It doesn't matter what the spoon has in it: it carries more than just food, it carries meaning.  Give Helena orange juice in a spoon, and she'll spit it out.  Give it to her in an adult's cup, and she'll plead for more.

And that's the point of semiotics: symbols and signs matter.  They don't just refer to things, but they bleed into those things, imbuing the signified with the taste of the signifier, the thing with the sound and associations of the word.  The Danes named the beautiful island they found in the north Atlantic "Iceland", and the terrible, glaciated place "Greenland", largely so that other countries would think that the sign described the place, and leave them alone on their wonderful geyser and hot spring paradise.  Much of marketing is based on the same premise: associate the right words and signs with a thing, and people will come to like even something as nasty as Coca Cola or Cognac.



But there's another issue behind the spoon, too.  Adults hold the spoon, and we give it to babies.  They aren't the actors of the action, not the protagonists of the story.  Since helping children to see themselves as protagonists, as actors on the world stage, is what most of Rita and my work and mature writing has been about, I suppose it makes sense that I would talk with Helena about that problem, too.  She wants to feel like she is the agent, that she is the one doing the eating (and the choosing, the chewing, everything).  Almost all adults have come to wonder at and fear that one simple, infantile phrase, "I can do it myself," and Helena has already reached it at six months, long before she is able to speak.

Smashed banana and applesauce are the foods that start most babies on the road to eating, but Helena hates them, they literally make her vomit.  The foods come on a spoon that also carries meanings she doesn't like, and she doesn't control the process.  But hand her a piece of a ripe pear, and she'll gum away at it contentedly.  The same with a peeled half of an orange.  And yesterday, Rita pierced the grains on a corn on the cob, and Helena eagerly sucked out the marrow.  It was a messy process, but a wonderful one, and she smiled and laughed and ate with real gusto.


In fact, Helena loves to eat.  It's just that she want so eat the right symbols along with her food, and she wants to do it herself.