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Consumer Perceptions of "Fish" Food

GERVAISE DEBUCQUET

Audencia Business School, Nantes, France

1.1. Introduction

Due to being omnivores (Fischler 1990), humans are both obliged to diversify food sources to satisfy nutritional needs and the willingness of choosing these sources to vary the pleasures provided by the act of eating. These choices are made according to the availability of food, individual expectations, as well as the more or less affirmed prescriptions of social and cultural groups. In all cultures, animal foods are the subject of the strongest prescriptions, which can lead to prohibitions, avoidance or the expression of simple aversions. Indeed, animal products have always been the object of beliefs and myths and have thus crystallized a certain number of fears (Vialles 1998; Ferrières 2002) due to a form of magical thinking inherent in the act of incorporation (Rozin et al. 1986). Thus, incorporating the meat of an animal implies, in addition to ingesting its nutritional components, ingesting, more or less consciously, its symbolic attributes (Douglas 2005). In the continuity of Hippocrates' thought, we can say that "one is what one eats" by virtue of these two mechanisms.

Incorporating fish into diets is therefore symbolically incorporating the real and supposed, imagined properties of the animal as well as of the sea (Fischler 1994); this gives rise to a symbolic equivalence between the sea, fish and those who eat them (Corbin 2005) and to a particular place for fish in collective representations. In fact, animals, depending on their nature and their origin - terrestrial, marine, lake or river - have, from time immemorial and in various socio-cultural spaces, conveyed contrasting imaginations and representations, which determine what is edible and what is a food taboo (Leach 1980). In the order of food, the lexical oppositions between "fish" and "flesh (associated with meat)" reveal the distinction between what comes from the aquatic environment and what comes from other environments (Vialles 1998). As a result, land, animal, meat and fish, regardless of their nutritional profile, are not completely interchangeable for committed eaters.

Questioning the reasons for eating fish reveals, even today, some of the specificities of this singular food and, through it, of the fish animal, questioned since antiquity, endowed with a particular status in the Judeo-Christian era and finally, reconsidered more recently in the light of dietetic and ecological imperatives.

1.2. Thinking about fish

1.2.1. Naming the unknown

In the order of the living, fish has always occupied a singular place that should be placed in relation to the representations of its habitat as well as of its own characteristics such as they have been conveyed both by academic discourse and through religious or popular beliefs. For a very long time, fish and other aquatic creatures remained poorly known because, not immediately visible to "earthlings", they escaped any sensitive experience. Then, the rare occasions to observe them and to understand their habits, their ways of life and reproduction did not facilitate the work of species classification.

In antiquity, fish, their anatomy, their behaviors (olfaction, reproduction, sight, mobility, etc.) were thought of by analogy with terrestrial animals and by anthropomorphic projection and thus many errors of interpretation have been highlighted (Byl and Schouls 1990). Well before scientific nomenclatures, in his History of Animals (Barthélémy-Saint Hilaire 1883), Aristotle used vernacular names or names borrowed from terrestrial animals, such as mule, wolf or "sea toad", to designate fish, to which certain characteristics of very distant animals, terrestrial mammals, birds or batrachians were attributed (Louis 1971). At the end of the Middle Ages, only a dozen fishes were known.

The underwater imaginings deployed in Jules Verne's 1870 work, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, then fed into collective representations of the sea and aquatic creatures, which have endured long despite the beginning of oceanography as a science in the 19th century. As Elkays (2018, p. 14) puts it, "from an epistemological perspective, the marine environment is only accessible through technological artifacts". And it is perhaps this that explains why, despite the advent of modern science, the sea remains a relatively alien world to terrestrial humans, still charged with imaginaries and beliefs that give aquatic foods a special place in the food order.

1.2.2. The imaginary of the marine world: permanence and metamorphosis

The marine world nourishes ambivalent representations, fascinating and repulsive at the same time (Geistdoerfer 1998). For a long time, it has been thought of as the domain of monsters (Le Bras-Chopard 2000), of the damned, of the dead, and the fears embodied by necrophagous fish are still alive.

Corbin (2005) explains how relations with the sea have been shaped over time, a world that was at first unknown, then a medium for anxieties and imaginations linked to the abyss and perils of the sea, the scene of the flood for fishermen and sailors exposed to the risks of Hell. The marine world does not belong to the divine but is part of a vision opposed to that of the earthly paradise, of Eden. These representations were progressively transformed, more positive from the 18th century with the increase of the frequentation of the seaside for its beneficial and therapeutic effects. While the image of a "tamed" sea was taking shape and the "desire for the shore" was awakening among land lovers in search of visual and sensory emotions, the coastal fringes became a place of vacation and relaxation where fishing and boating were practiced (Corbin 1990). In the Dutch and Italian paintings of the end of the 18th century, this slow metamorphosis is felt and the figures of the agitated sea made people want to "see the sea" and to "eat fish". It was henceforth a sea which made a spectacle of itself and which marked at the same time, under the influence of the Christian church, the separation between Mankind and the cosmos with the favor of a "natural theology" (Corbin 1997).

The inversion of these representations was also illustrated by the promotion of "sea bathing", especially on the British coasts, whose "cold, salty and choppy" water was reputed to be a remedy for the ills of the soul and the body, or even female sterility; the analogy between the composition of sea water and that of blood serum was also supposed to explain, among the inhabitants of the coast, the fertility of fishermen. At the dawn of the 19th century, the virtues of warm water and sunbathing were proclaimed, inspired by Mediterranean habits, and in less than a century a new relationship with the sea and with bathing was established, as illustrated by the effervescence of seaside resorts during the summer (Geistdoerfer 2003). As Corbin (1997) points out, this is not a question of a clean break, because all these representations continue to exist and are still intermingled in the minds of contemporaries. At the time of the awareness of global warming, of the pollution of the seas and oceans, it is the figures of the deluge and the threats on the fringes of the continents which are reactivated. We are worried about the irreversible stigma left by a sea "coveted" for its living or energy resources.

These representations are particularly intertwined in the minds of the French, who, although they have access to a long coastline, are above all "land lovers", contrary to the countries of northern Europe or in particular, Portugal (Geistdorfer 2007). The French are attracted to the sea especially during vacation periods to see the last wilderness or an "ecologized" shoreline staged by tourism agents. Sincere attraction to the people and jobs of the sea is less common, even where we might expect it, such as in local fish distribution channels (Lazuech and Debucquet 2017).

1.2.3. The representations associated with marine foods: the historical legacy

By going back to the origins of the opposition between "flesh (associated with meat)" and "fish", Vialles (1998) shows that this distinction is not based on the objective or anatomical characteristics of the products but on their origin and, therefore, on the systems of representations associated with the sources of these foods. Thus, it is necessary to resituate this opposition in the binary prescriptions of Roman Christianity distinguishing "lean foods" for the days of Lent from "meat" or "fatty foods" for the days of carnage. During Lent, fish is one of the few animal foods tolerated. To abstain from meat during Lent means to deprive ourselves of fat and blood as well as to abstain from all food pleasures (Rousseau 2005). It is because of its lesser symbolic proximity to human and human flesh that fish food is tolerated; unlike the meat of land animals, it is less able to regenerate bodies and "make blood" (Rousseau 2005). In Aristotelian representations, partly taken up in Christian beliefs, fish are indeed "cold beings", "devoid of blood", their vital force being supposed to come from the water itself (Vialles 1998; Rousseau 2005)1. It is interesting to note the survival of these...