The “Abominable Pig” and the “Mother of All Vices”: Pork, Wine, and the Culinary Clash of Civilizations in the Early Modern Mediterranean (original) (raw)
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International Review of Social Research , 2016
As an everyday activity, sustaining our life, eating experiences reveal complex relationship between food and society, involving material and symbolic aspects of cultures, dietary order, but also aesthetics or hedonism (Levi-Strauss, 1964, Douglas, 1966, Fischler, 1980, Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). Bringing on stage cultural values, food becomes a central identity marker, defining personality, social class, lifestyles, gender roles and relationships, from family, to community, to ethnic groups or nationality, changing through time and place. Food is a lens to analyze society order, historical changes, power and politics, if we think of the pioneering works in this area of studies, from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the social classes’ taste (1979), Jack Goody’s connection between cuisine and class in West Africa (1982), Sidney Mintz research on sugar, modern times and colonialism (1985), to Arjun Appadurai’s work on nationalism and cuisines (1988). The more recent trend towards food heritage and heritagisation reveals the dynamic role of history in understanding culture, as well as the marketization of culinary traditions. Social changes, like evolutions in intergroup relations within societies, migration phenomena such as nomadism, refugees, expatriates, tourism, alongside with the industrialization of food production or the globalization of foods, the role of mass media and new technologies, all have their impact on the food production, distribution, preparation, foodways or drinkways changing either by expressing individual or group preferences for alternative consumption manners, or at collective level. This issue on ‘Food and Culture. Cultural patterns and practices related to food in everyday life’ gives, once *Corresponding author: Anda Georgiana Becuţ, National Institute for Research and Cultural Training, Ministry of Culture, Bucharest, Romania, E-mail: andabecut@yahoo.com. Jean-Jacques, Boutaud Universite de Bourgogne Angelica Marinescu, University of Bucharest more, reason to Roland Barthes who, in his introduction to Brillat Savarin’s Physiologie du gout, understands food, generally (and gastronomy, particularly) as a domain fit for developing a humanistic approach, seen as total social fact, including different metalanguages. As he explains, ‘It is this encyclopedic view, - this ”humanism” - that encompasses, for Brillat-Savarin, the name of gastronomy” (Barthes, 1975).
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