Food Studies

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

For years, critics and fans of C. S. Lewis have noted his curious attentiveness to descriptions of food and scenes of eating. Some attempts have been made to interpret Lewis’s use of food, but never in a manner comprehensively unifying Lewis’s culinary expressions with his own thought and beliefs. My study seeks to fill this void. The introduction demonstrates how Lewis’s culinary language aggregates through elements of his life, his literary background, and his Judeo-Christian worldview. Using the grammar of his own culinary language, I examine Lewis’s fiction for patterns found within his meals and analyze these patterns for theological allusions, grouping them according to major categories of systematic theology. Chapter two argues that ecclesiastical themes appear whenever Lewis’s protagonists eat together. The ritualized meal progression, evangelistic discourse, and biographical menus create a unity that points to parallels between Lewis’s body of protagonists and the church. Chapter three focuses on the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and charges that Lewis’s meals which are eaten in the presence of the novel’s Christ figure or which include bread and wine in the menu reliably align with the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. Chapter four studies how sinful eating affects the spiritual states of Lewis’s characters. The chapter first shows how Lewis’s culinary language draws from Edenic sources, resonating with a very gastronomic Fall of Humanity, then examines how the progressively sinful eating of certain characters signifies a gradual alienation from the Divine. The fifth, and concluding, chapter argues that Lewis’s portrayal of culinary desire and pleasure ultimately points to an eschatological theme. This theme culminates near the end of Lewis’s novels either through individual characters expressing superlative delight in their food or through a unified congregation of protagonists eating a celebratory feast during the novel’s dénouement. I close the study by emphasizing how this approach to Lewis’s meals offers a complete spiritual analysis of Lewis’s main characters that also consistently supports Lewis’s own theology.

This article analyzes how mass-market cruise lines mobilize food, laborers, and built environments to offer passengers cosmopolitanism with the purpose of maintaining a unique business model. It is argued that while companies target a growing demand for culturally immersive dining experiences, they do not seek to offer complete immersion in any one culture but cosmopolitanism through a combination of multiple themed establishments on a mobile platform. Culinary themes are installed using labor and built environments, for instance through the placement of visual and material culture in eateries. While some onboard dining experiences are themed around the cultures of nations on the ship’s itinerary, many evoke international cultures. In studying how mass-market cruise lines as mobile spaces of containment combine both international and localized dining experiences to offer the “world on a ship,” scholars of tourism can better understand how touristic companies produce cosmopolitanism at destinations.

This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, it explores the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceeds to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen.

The distinctively Shiʿi conception of non-Muslims as bearers of a contagious form of impurity emerges gradually, reaching its classical form only in the 5th/11th century. Contrary to common scholarly presumptions, Q. 9.28 does not constitute the point of origin for this conception but rather serves as retroactive justification for its validity. This essay utilizes ḥadīth collections and works of law from the 2nd/8th through 5th/11th centuries to trace the emergence of Shiʿi notions regarding the impurity of non-Muslims and the parallel emergence of distinctively Shiʿi norms regarding the meat of animals slaughtered by non-Muslims. It concludes by suggesting that the differences between Sunni and Shiʿi notions regarding the food and impurity of non-Muslims reflect the different ways in which Sunnis and Shiʿi conceive of the Islamic community itself.

This report estimates the retail value of the average Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) food package delivered to FDPIR participants in fiscal year (FY) 2009. The estimated retail value of the average FDPIR food package as delivered in FY 2009 was $78.44 per month per FDPIR participant. The report’s retail price estimate probably understates the true retail value of the FDPIR food package because the cost of food from retailers located  on or near Indian reservations is likely above national average retail food costs.

Este libro nace de un proyecto sobre migraciones y culturas alimentarias en Iberoamérica (incluyendo España y Portugal) iniciado en 2009 y ligado en su última fase a la Cátedra UNESCO de Alimentación, Cultura y Desarrollo de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Algunos de los textos publicados en este libro nacen directamente de este proyecto, mientras que algunos otros, de carácter claramente complementario, han sido invitados a participar y a dialogar en la misma obra. De este modo, el libro que aquí se inicia responde a distintas necesidades y objetivos. Por un lado, es una de las muy pocas obras en lengua castellana que se dedican específicamente al análisis de las culturas alimentarias en situación de migración, cubriendo así un hueco necesario en la bibliografía existente. Por otro lado, este libro intenta reunir en un mismo espacio y de manera dialogante los trabajos de distintos especialistas que se han dedicado al tema de la alimentación y las migraciones desde diferentes puntos de vista; trabajos que en muy pocas ocasiones han visto la posibilidad de situarse en un mismo contexto y en una situación que permita una revisión y una comparación conjuntas. Igualmente, a partir de esta situación, podemos articular también la detección de determinados ejes temáticos que aparecen vinculados a las distintas visiones de los diferentes investigadores, en distintos territorios y posiblemente con distintos intereses: permanencias y rupturas en los hábitos alimentarios, fronteras alimentarias, aprovisionamiento, etnicidad, nostalgia, restauración? Este libro analiza estos aspectos desde una perspectiva cultural y abierta.

The fishing industry, especially the fishing of tuna, was the main economical activity for many populations living near the Strait of Gibraltar from the VI century BC onwards, as testified by archeological and literary sources. At the Phoenician colony of Gadir, and other, allied settlements, coins were struck with the image of the tuna fish on one side and the god Melqart, protector of the Western Phoenicians, on the other. This relationship between the Phoenician god who became identified with the Greek Herakles and tuna fish has often been discussed, but it has never, to the best of our knowledge, being used as the key to unlock the meaning of certain literary sources which reference the opening and closing of the Strait by Herakles, the levelling of the seas and the crossing of the Strait with the stolen cattle of Geryon, the monster who lived in the island Erytheia in the Ocean.

Within the context of the broader food sovereignty literature, and with a specific focus on notions of America Indian sovereignty, this article explores how members of thirty-nine different Native American community farming and gardening projects in the United States describe and define food sovereignty, as both concept and method. This article further distinguishes how principles of food sovereignty are being operationalized in the broader goals of promoting community health, sustainability, and local economic systems, and of reclaiming and maintaining tribal culture.

This article aims to understand the stages of adopting veganism in young people. To achieve this objective, we analyze 30 biographical interviews with young vegans in Santiago, Chile. The participant’s stories allow us to identify that the transition to this new lifestyle implies acquiring a secondary habitus, that is, a gradual shift in understanding and acting in the world, which entails progressive identity changes until becoming vegan. This transition consists of five steps: personal questioning, vegetarianism attempt, vegetarianism, veganism, and activism. This path constitutes a career process but presents nuances according to the young people’s social class of origin and individual characteristics. The main contribution of this article is to delve into the career stages that lead to the consolidation of a vegan identity, based on two classical sociological concepts (career and habitus).

"Food knowledge in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages: between culinary practice and food hygiene": How is food knowledge spread in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages? This is the purpose of this article. At that time, Paris was already a big city where food of all kinds poured in. Three poles disseminate and organize food knowledge: public authorities that legislate on the supply and safety of consumers; food professionals that codify manufacturing standards; and Parisians who transmit the practical knowledge of food... /

Comment se diffusent les savoirs alimentaires dans le Paris de la fin du Moyen Âge ? Tel est le propos de cet article. A cette époque, Paris est déjà une grande ville où affluent des denrées de toutes sortes. Trois pôles diffusent et organisent les savoirs alimentaires : les pouvoirs publics qui légifèrent sur l'approvisionnement et la sécurité du consommateur ; les professionnels de bouche qui codifient les normes de fabrication ; et les Parisiens qui transmettent la connaissance pratique de l'aliment...

In children’s and young adult literatures, the way that literature provides readers with diverse ways of seeing the world, is particularly relevant as those texts can be considered to function as agents of socialization that promote the norms of behaviour of a nation, as well as its cultural images and narratives (Pearce 2003, 238). Young people literature rewrites “social and cultural history for the purpose of shaping the present” (Stephens 1996, 181) and can thus mediate the transformation of attitudes and values, or confirm existing ones (Macintyre 2011, 352) such as the evolution of multiculturalism. Indeed, Pearce (2003) has argued that multicultural representation is at a third stage in which “ethnicity is not a marker of cultural difference but an accepted part of Australian life” (246), having gone beyond two previous stages that had “superficial or cosmetic” (Fish 1997, 378) depictions of multiculturalism such as stories centred on Anglo-Celtic protagonists benefiting from an exotic ethnic other, or told from the point of view of an “ethnic” insider by Anglo-Celtic writers (Stephens 1996).
However, I will argue that multiculturalism and its representations have not reached such a stage. Alice Pung’s young adult fictional novel Laurinda (2014) showcases the covert racism that Australia’s politics of multiculturalism still conceal under its well-intentioned but superficial acceptation of ethnic minorities “by virtue of Othering” (Ang 2001: 139) into its Anglo-Celtic structure. While set in the 90s, the protagonist Lucy Lam, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese teenager, is subjected to many instances of covert racism (Dunn et al. 2004) that still occur nowadays. Those instances will be analysed in key extracts that feature food due to its historical use in the articulation of attitudes throughout Australia’s changing relationship with immigration and its Asian neighbours.

In the last decades, the relationship between food and nature has experienced two intertwined processes: the de-naturalization of agri-food industry, that apparently has ‘freed’ food from natural processes and the ri-naturalization, linked to the quality turn, that recently transformed agrifood systems and food consumption. This article focuses on the relationships between food and nature, basing on the analysis of the processes that are recently taking place in Valposchiavo (Switzerland), where local agri-food chains sustainability is the core of local development and territorial marketing strategies. The analysis uses the theoretical and methodological framework of food political ecology,
which helps to unveil and critically analyse the complexity and the political dimension of such processes.

For Mongols, sharing food is more than just eating meals. Through a process of “opening” and “closing”, on a daily basis or at events, in the family circle or with visitors, sharing food guarantees the proper order of social relations. It also ensures the course of the seasons and the cycle of human life. Through food sharing, humans thus invite happiness to their families and herds. Sandrine Ruhlmann has lived long months, since 2000, in the Mongolian steppe and in the city. She describes and analyses in detail the contemporary food system and recognizes intertwined ideas and values inherited from shamanism, Buddhism and communist ideology. Through meat-on-the-bone, creamy milk skin, dumplings or sole-shaped cakes, she highlights a whole way of thinking and living.

Text revised and expanded by Sandrine Ruhlmann
Translated from the French by Nora Scott

Translated from L’appel du bonheur. Le partage alimentaire mongol by Sandrine Ruhlmann, first published in French in 2016 by the Centre d’Études Mongoles et Sibériennes, as the 5th volume of the series Nord- Asie, the supplement to Études mongoles & sibériennes, centrasiatiques & tibétaines.

ISBN 978-90-04-40965-1
https://brill.com/view/title/54850?lang=en

Finalist, 2021 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies

Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society

Reveals nostalgia as a new way of maintaining Jewish continuity

In 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history surrounding them.

Beyond the Synagogue argues that nostalgic activities such as visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street or eating traditional Jewish foods should be understood as American Jewish religious practices. In making the case that these practices are not just cultural, but are actually religious, Rachel B. Gross asserts that many prominent sociologists and historians have mistakenly concluded that American Judaism is in decline, and she contends that they are looking in the wrong places for Jewish religious activity. If they looked outside of traditional institutions and practices, such as attendance at synagogue or membership in Jewish Community Centers, they would see that the embrace of nostalgia provides evidence of an alternative, under-appreciated way of being Jewish and of maintaining Jewish continuity.

Tracing American Jews’ involvement in a broad array of ostensibly nonreligious activities, including conducting Jewish genealogical research, visiting Jewish historic sites, purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish nostalgia to children, and seeking out traditional Jewish foods, Gross argues that these practices illuminate how many American Jews are finding and making meaning within American Judaism today.

Książka jest wysoce intertekstualna: absorbuje i transformuje (Julia Kristeva) teksty i obrazy z różnych epok i z różnych kultur. Interpretacja owych tekstów i obrazów - zawsze własna - wskazuje na niezwykłą wiedzę, orientację intelektualną biegłość autorki w wielu dziedzinach nauki. Rozważania teoretyczne podporządkowane są pytaniu: czy jedzenie jest sztuką? Czytelnik dowie się, jak na nie odpowiadali wybitni myśliciele i myślicielki, a zarazem pozna ich upodobania kulinarne. Co jadł Kant, co było daniem popisowym Hume’a i dlaczego Sartre stronił od skorupiaków, a Giard unikała gotowania? Dorota Koczanowicz tworzy swoistą komparatystykę jedzenia; jeśli można tak rzec: porównawcze sztuki kulinarne - przez pryzmat humanistyki. (...)

Szczególną uwagę poświęca ona praktykom artystycznym od F.T. Marinettiego, Abramoyić i Ulaya oraz Marthy Rosler do Julity Wójcik, Elżbiety Jabłońskiej, Anny Królikiewicz, Marije Vogelzang, a w szczególności Daniela Spoerriego. Twórczość tego ostatniego doczekała się interpretacji autorki w pierwszoosobowej opowieści. Z kolei rozważania o sztuce Rirkrita Tirayaniji przenoszą nas do kultury tajskiej, dzięki czemu książka wzbogaca się o perspektywę postkolonialną. Spotkanie i - dodałbym - gościnność wobec Obcego to doświadczenie mocno obecne we współczesnej sztuce jedzenia.
Z recenzji Tomasza Kitlińskiego

In this paper, I argue that frontiers are dilemmas composed of multiple dualities, be they exclusive and inclusive powers, connected space and national periphery, or modernity and primitiveness. These dilemmas, in consequence, become the mechanism to create a leeway for the state to ‘tailor’ different meanings of frontier to meet the contingent market demands. I use tea production on China’s southwest frontier as an example to demonstrate that dilemma is not an end result, but a mechanism to rearticulate the relationship among frontier, the state and the market economy. Specifically, I argue that dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have been forged by the Chinese state with its incompatible desires between ‘modernisation’ and ‘primitiveness’ of the tea landscapes in Yunnan, a province on China’s southwest frontier. Meanwhile, the incompatible desires and the resulting dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have further mobilised the state to flexibly rework its power to reconstruct the frontier to meet contingent market demand. Based on the shifting meanings of tea landscapes, the state has flexibly ‘shuttled through’ the dilemmas between development of modernisation and preservation of primitiveness on the frontier.

Les chercheurs donnent rarement à voir le détail des choix méthodologiques qui fondent leurs recherches. Les considérations théoriques et pratiques qui les ont guidés dans ces choix restent souvent implicites. Dans cet ouvrage, les méthodes pour étudier l’alimentation et les « mangeurs » sont au centre. L’usage du terme « mangeurs » vise à distinguer ces derniers de la figure du consommateur. Il met l’accent sur la multidimensionnalité de l’acte de manger, cet acte qui engage le corps biologique tout autant que la socialité des individus et les insère dans l’espace et le temps ainsi que dans des échanges économiques.
Cet ouvrage est le fruit d’un travail collectif réunissant une quarantaine de chercheuses et chercheurs confirmés. Soucieux de pédagogie, il a pour objectif de présenter de manière critique quinze méthodes aujourd’hui utilisées dans ou à la croisée de différentes disciplines : anthropologie, économie, géographie, nutrition et sociologie.
L’ouvrage intéressera étudiants, enseignants, chercheurs experts et autres professionnels à la recherche de méthodes permettant de mieux comprendre ou d’affiner leurs propres outils d’étude de l’alimentation et des mangeurs.
L'ouvrage existe en version papier et est également téléchargeable gratuitement en EPUB et PDF sur le site de Quae : https://www.quae.com/produit/1696/9782759233472/methodes-d-investigation-de-l-alimentation-et-des-mangeurs

γ-Glutamyltranspeptidase (GGT) hydrolyzes γ-glutamyl compounds and transfers their γ-glutamyl moieties to amino acids and peptides.  We previously showed that the “umami” taste of soy sauce could be improved by the addition of salt-tolerant Bacillus subtilis GGT to the fermentation mixture, “moromi”.  Although miso fermentation is a semi-solid fermentation, unlike soy sauce fermentation, this was also the case. When 15 units of purified B. subtilis GGT were added to 418 g miso “moromi” (fermentation mixture), the glutamate concentration in “moromi” became 20 mM higher and the “umami” taste became stronger than without the addition of GGT after 2 to 6 months of fermentation.  In addition, γ-Glu-Val and γ-Glu-Val-Gly, which are known as “kokumi” peptides, were identified in “tamari”, and the concentrations of these γ-glutamyl peptides in “tamari" fermented by the addition of GGT were significantly higher than those of “moromi” without the addition of GGT.  These results indicate ...

Extrait de : Bruno LAURIOUX (dir.), De la nature à la table au Moyen Âge : l'acquisition des aliments, Paris, Édition électronique du CTHS (Actes des congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques), 2017.
Publication des actes du 138 e Congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques tenu à Rennes en 2013.

Recipes are filled with sensory directions related to taste, appearance, texture, and smell, but less often to the sounds of food cooking. While cooking and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, is recognized as a sonic experience, we are rarely specifically instructed to “listen in.” Some scholars argue that such skills cannot be written into recipes, but rather must be passed on in practice. While I largely agree with this claim, I was challenged to find exceptions in cookbooks. In this essay, I discuss some of the few but delightful examples of sonic instruction in recipes. I conclude that while sounds are rare in cookbooks, as these examples show, listening is a skill that provides valuable information in the kitchen.

"Nous gardons tous au fond d’un tiroir un menu qui nous rappelle l’heureux souvenir d’un repas convivial. Mais que savons-nous vraiment du menu ? De sa genèse, de son histoire, et de son apport à la société ? Des premiers menus du Moyen Âge aux menus dégustation des chefs d’aujourd’hui, Patrick Rambourg raconte comment le menu a migré de la cuisine à la salle pour devenir un outil de la convivialité et de la gastronomie, et un support artistique et publicitaire. Il présente une histoire inédite du menu qui témoigne de l’évolution culinaire de la société et des mœurs de table, de nos pratiques alimentaires et gastronomiques. Car le menu d’un repas est « le mémoire de ce qui doit y entrer » (Grimod de la Reynière, 1808)."

Livre préfacé par Pascal Ory.

This article analyses the gender issues raised by the representation of the woman in the kitchen on Italian food TV. In Italy, food and women have always been constructed as a whole, but today this model seems to be redundant. Controversial postfeminist readings of Nigella's cooking shows and William's categories of dominant, emergent and residual help investigate, in a constructivist sense, how Italian TV deals with this social change. Through qualitative, semiotic and gender analysis, the article focuses on three Italian food shows broadcast at noon. Results show that the three programmes mediate the role of the woman, drawing on the model of trattorie, traditional Italian restaurants in which the women cook and the men serve the tables. This negotiation helps balance gender relations without  revolutionary outcomes. In fact, at the same time, it modernises the old model of the housewife and does not move the woman out of the kitchen.

Our body compulsory demands food, water and air to keep its vital functions and yet their economic nature is rather diverse with food mostly considered a private good, water suffering an accelerated privatization process and air so far considered a global common good. Food has evolved from a common good and local resource to a national asset and then to a transnational commodity as the commodification process is rather completed nowadays. Cultivated food is fully privatized and this consideration means that human beings can eat food as long as they have money to but it or means to produce it. With the dominant no money-no food rationality, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. In order to provide a sound foundation for the transition towards sustainable food systems, the very nature of food as a pure private good is contested and subsequently reversed in this paper, proposing a re-conceptualisation of food as a common good, a necessary narrative for the redesign of the dominating agro-industrial food system that merely sees food as a tradable commodity. This aspirational transition shall lead us to a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centred food system. The idea of the commons is applied to food, deconstructing food as a pure private good and reconstructing it as an impure commons that can be better produced and distributed by a hybrid tri-centric governance system compounded by market rules, public regulations and collective actions. Several food-related elements are already considered as common goods (i.e. fish stocks, wild fruits, cuisine recipes, agricultural knowledge, food safety regulations and unpatented genetic resources) as well as food’s implications (hunger eradication) and benefits (public health and good nutrition). Should food and be consider as a commons, the implications for the governance of the global food system would be enormous, with examples ranging from placing food outside the framework agreements dealing with pure private goods, banning financial speculation on food commodities or preparing international binding agreements to govern the production, distribution and access of food to every human being.

This book examines the ways Cuban families struggle to access food and maintain a decent quality of life as the socialist welfare state continues to falter in post-Soviet Cuba. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, book reveals how Cuban families struggle to acquire food and assemble “a decent meal,” a local social category where families determine whether food quality and cultural-appropriateness meet their standards. The research illuminates the social and emotional dimensions of the practices of food acquisition. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and subsequent the loss of its most significant trade partner, Cuba entered a period of economic hardship known as the “Special Period.” Although new trade agreements have significantly improved the quantity and quality of rationed food, supplies have not returned to Soviet-era levels. Several years after the worst scarcities of the Special Period, many people from Santiago reported that they continued to live with food shortages and economic hardship. This book reveals that one of the most common ways of dealing with food scarcity, was “luchando la vida” (struggling for life): the arduous task of finding ingredients seen as essential to what is considered a “decent” meal. To understand this situation, the book introduces “the politics of adequacy,” which details how people resist and make sense of scarcity or changing availability of basic life necessities, such as food. This work is based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork inside the homes of 22 families in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city. Spanning neighborhood, social class, household income level, and skin color, this book captures previously undocumented details of household dynamics, community interaction, and individual reflections on everyday life in Cuba today.

Book Keywords: Food, Cuba, Socialism, Inequality, Consumption, Adequacy, Caribbean, Distribution, Household, Everyday Life

Tutti gli sforzi, sia individuali che collettivi sono indirizzati verso la realizzazione del gelato; questo dolce diventa il simbolo del mangiare Italienisch-Essen ma anche l’approdo al lavoro autonomo, frutto di una motivazione personale socializzata a livello familiare e comunitario.