Eating on the Blue Train: food and social mobility on South African Railways postcards

Prof Jeanne van Eeden from the Department of Visual Arts recently presented a paper at the ‘International Symposium on Food Studies: Transnational Conversations’ held at the University of Pretoria between 22 and 23 July 2016. Her field of expertise is postcards, and her paper was entitled ‘Eating on the Blue Train: food and social mobility on South African Railways postcards’. She spoke about a number of postcards produced by the South African Railways (now Transnet) from the 1950s to the 1980s that show people relaxing and enjoying food and drink on luxury trains whilst traveling through the South African landscape. The South African Railways played a seminal role in South Africa in terms of publicising the nation as an international tourist destination from the 1920s onwards. This was done by means of posters, advertisements, films, and postcards and postcard calendars. The visual imagery used by the SAR established iconic views and scenes of South Africa and South African life. She submitted that the postcards of meals on the Blue Train in particular reflect an insular world of entitlement and exclusivity related to patterns of leisure and mobility and by implication, a racialised leisure economy. Food and particularly the excess of food has generally been a cultural signifier of wealth and sociocultural capital in terms of Bourdieu. As part of the wider circuit of culture, food also becomes a signifying practice that operates across a number of similar semiotic platforms. She concluded the paper by suggesting that the myth of South Africa as a ‘white man’s country’ was disseminated by means of visual culture such as postcards.