Taste, culture and history (original) (raw)

Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past

Ethnohistory, 1998

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Aesthetics & Food (First Draft for Encyclopedia of Food and Society- 3k words)

Encyclopedia of Food and Society, 2024

Abstract: Aesthetics as a philosophical concept excluded food in its high Western construction in the 18th century. This article shows how that was a provincial European construction that is fast losing its raison d'etre in an increasingly globalizing conceptual world that puts European elite culture in its place. I illustrate that process by showing how spices lost value in that universe of modern Eurocentric judgment and is returning to haunt haute cuisine in the North Atlantic world.

Introduction: Culinary Cultures and Convergent Histories

Cooking Cultures

A n intimate association of eating with sensual pleasure in Muslim theologydepicted in the Garden of Delights-had occasioned serious unease in the Christian world that could barely digest the bonding of religion and sensuousness. What caused immense concern was the fact that this 'philosophy of gratification' did not only promise joys after death. It spoke of, indeed encouraged, the reaping of pleasure in life by associating good life with good eating (Peterson, 1980, 321). This was in stark contrast to the austerity and temperance demanded of Christians in this life as a step toward an angelic society in heaven (Peterson, 1980, 322). Hence, after the Qu'ran was translated into Latin by the mid-twelfth century, scholars devoted themselves to the task of discerning whether this association was real or allegorical. Others, however, found a different use for this bonding of eating and pleasure in this life. An 'upheaval' occurred in the cooking of the European elite from about 1300 CE, accompanied by a marked change in the attitude toward food (Peterson, 1980, 317). I begin the introduction on this note to divulge, at the outset, an important argument of the book. The volume seeks to explore how food, cooking and cuisine, in different societies, cultures and over different periods of time, are essentially results of confection-combination-of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination, inflected by relations of power and experiments with creativity. Such blends, churned out of transcultural flows of goods, people and ideas, colonial encounters and engagements, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, enable convergent histories of the globe kneaded by food www.cambridge.org © in this web service Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-14036-3-Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling Edited by Ishita Banerjee-Dube Excerpt More information Ishita Banerjee-Dube 2 and cooking that tell us about being and belonging, pride, identity, hospitality and sociability, class and power, and nation and culture that are ever ready to be cast in different moulds. They also point to a convergence between the histories of the world as one of 'species migration', whether through climate or habitat change or population pressure, or through more active processes of human intervention, and of food, eating and cuisine as being constituted by such mixing and migration. The different chapters of the book look at the evolution of food in distinct parts of the globe over different periods of time from diverse perspectives. Yet, together they portray and convey the polyphony that surrounds food and cooking, a polyphony often subsumed by the attempted homogenisation that underlies the construction of 'national', 'natural' or 'regional' cultures. In contrast to such homogenisation, this book offers a tale strewn together from a variety of smells and tastes, peoples and places and their multiple mixtures. The chapters also highlight the importance of sharing and exchanging food as vital elements of 'culture' and sociability, elements that are often used to mark social distinctions and not erase them (Peters, 2016; Pilcher, 1998). An early cookery book of Baghdad had drawn upon the Qu'ran to declare food to be 'the noblest and most consequential' of the six human pleasures, along with drinks, clothes, sex, scent and sound (Peterson, 1980, 322). The write-up on an adventurous book on the history of food calls cuisine 'the defining characteristic of a culture' (Fernández-Armesto, 2002). What makes food and cuisine tick as the 'noblest pleasure', and the most significant element of a culture? What makes Indian food serve as 'street food' in Cairo and 'court food' in Isfahan and yet remain a prop of national culture? How has 'curry', invented during British rule in India, moved back and forth between India and England and come to signify 'Indian food' in the world? This volume addresses some of these issues in its attempt to track how peoples and cultures relate to food and cuisine, and how such bonding shapes cartographies of belonging and identities. It explores the elements and processes that go into the cooking of cultures, in which food and cuisine are flavoured by adaptation and innovation, transcultural and trans-regional flows, and nostalgia and recreation ; and 'national', 'regional' and 'cosmopolitan' cultures, along with personhood, are concocted and confected. The volume takes into serious account reminders that food, as an important element of material culture, significantly shapes individual and collective identities (Palmer, 1998, 183) and that food is neither neutral nor innocent but a product of dominant ideologies and power structures (Cusack, 2000, 208). Indeed, the first essay of the volume examines and interrogates why and how certain plant and animal species are constructed as 'natural', 'native' and www.cambridge.org

Turkeys Away: Christmas Dinner, Mock Turtle Soup, and Using Food History to Teach World War I

World History Bulletin, 2023

have provided us with indispensable texts for the classroom, either as nreparatory material or as student reading assignments. Classes on transatlantic history, the Columbian Exchange, and cross-culhural diffusion benefit greatly from incorporating material from Candice Goucher's. Congotay! Congotay! A Global History ef Caribbean Fod² Erik Gilbert and Jonathan Reynolds have provided us with a student accessible text exploring the historical importance of salt, sugar, and spices (with silk being the featured non-food item) as globally traded foodstuffs in, Trading Tastes: Commodity and CHltural Exchange Since 1750. Jeffrey Pilcher's Food in World History, along with his work on identity and food in Latin America and the global reach of the humble taco have all become staples in world, Latin American, and food history courses. In addition to guest editing the 2008 World History Balletin issue and providing a masterful historiography in The Food Issue" of World History Connected, Rick Warner is also a former professional chef wvho regularly has an experiential cooking component in his undergraduate courses at Wabash College. This issue, focused on "Food and World History" appears at a time when the historical discipline no longer questions rigorous scholarship in food studies but welcomes it. Any definitive historiography of food history written today would include Sidney Mintz's ground-brcaking, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in MModern History to one of the most recent monographs on taste, Malcolm Purinton's Globalization in a Glass: Tbe Rise of Pilsner Beer throngb Tecbnology, Taste and Enpir. Indeed, there are perhaps hundreds of books and articles dedicated to food as it relates to commodities, culture, economies, gender, health, labor, mobilities, race, and ethnicity. The interdisciplinary series, California Studies in Food and Culture, alone includes 57 titles, all published since 2002.$ The history of taste, in particular, is a burgeoning area Or study with outs tanding works on such wide-ranging Oplcs as spices, colonial America, Britain's quest tor empire, and the relationship between place and taste. A Series of brief but inmminently useful articles published by 45