Re-orienting Cuisine

Re-orienting Cuisine
Author: Kwang Ok Kim
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2015-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782385630

Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.

Cuisine and Empire

Cuisine and Empire
Author: Rachel Laudan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2015-04-03
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520286316

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

Food in Memory and Imagination

Food in Memory and Imagination
Author: Beth Forrest
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350096199

How do we engage with food through memory and imagination? This expansive volume spans time and space to illustrate how, through food, people have engaged with the past, the future, and their alternative presents. Beth M. Forrest and Greg de St. Maurice have brought together first-class contributions, from both established and up-and-coming scholars, to consider how imagination and memory intertwine and sometimes diverge. Chapters draw on cases around the world-including Iran, Italy, Japan, Kenya, and the US-and include topics such as national identity, food insecurity, and the phenomenon of knowledge. Contributions represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This volume is a veritable feast for the contemporary food studies scholar.

The Emergence of National Food

The Emergence of National Food
Author: Atsuko Ichijo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350074152

What do deep fried mars bars, cod, and Bulgarian yoghurt have in common? Each have become symbolic foods with specific connotations, located to a very specific place and country. This book explores the role of food in society as a means of interrogating the concept of the nation-state and its sub-units, and reveals how the nation-state in its various disguises has been and is changing in response to accelerated globalisation. The chapters investigate various stages of national food: its birth, emergence, and decline, and why sometimes no national food emerges. By collecting and analysing a wide range of case studies from countries including Portugal, Mexico, the USA, Bulgaria, Scotland, and Israel, the book illustrates ways in which various social forces work together to shape social and political realities concerning food. The contributors, hailing from anthropology, history, sociology and political science, investigate the significance of specific food cultures, cuisines, dishes, and ingredients, and their association with national identity. In so doing, it becomes clearer how these two things interact, and demonstrates the scope and direction of the current study of food and nationalism.

A Taste of Power

A Taste of Power
Author: Katharina Vester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-10-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520960602

Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. A Taste of Power examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect wife and mother. In this brilliant interdisciplinary work, Katharina Vester examines how cookbooks became a way for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women in the kitchen, and for lesbian authors to insert themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. A Taste of Power engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.

Imagining Landscapes

Imagining Landscapes
Author: Monica Janowski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317118650

The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.

Imagined Identities

Imagined Identities
Author: Gönül Pultar
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2014-04-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815633424

How are identities being forged during the age of globalization? This collection of essays, by scholars from various disciplines and regions of the world, discusses both the construction and deconstruction of identity in its engagement with culture, ethnicity, and nationhood. The authors explore the tension resulting from the desire to create a new cultural space for identities that are at once national, regional, linguistic, and religious. Among the wide-ranging approaches, Tanja Stampfl looks at the elusiveness of cultural identity in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; Dawn Morais investigates issues of ethnicity and nationality in Malaysia’s tourism advertising; and Cathy Waegner explores ethnic identities as globalized market commodities. Throughout the volume, identity is approached from a variety of sites—fiction, news analysis, film, theme parks, and field work—to contribute new insight and perspective to the well-worn debate over what identity signifies in societies where the existence of minorities, both indigenous and immigrant, challenges the dominant group.

Rice Talks

Rice Talks
Author: Nir Avieli
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0253005302

An anthropological study of the culture surrounding food in a thriving Vietnamese town. Rice Talks explores the importance of cooking and eating in the everyday social life of Hoi An, a prosperous market town in central Vietnam known for its exceptionally elaborate and sophisticated local cuisine. In a vivid and highly personal account, Nir Avieli takes the reader from the private setting of the extended family meal into the public realm of the festive, extraordinary, and unique. He shows how foodways relate to class relations, gender roles, religious practices, cosmology, ethnicity, and even local and national politics. This evocative study departs from conventional anthropological research on food by stressing the rich meanings, generative capacities, and potential subversion embedded in foodways and eating. “In this very engaging narrative Avieli captures the flavor and richness of everyday lowland Vietnamese life, as well as the trials and tribulations of attempting to eke out a livelihood, fit within family hierarchical structures, and correctly pay homage to the necessary deities and ancestors.” —Sarah Turner, McGill University “Readers with an interest in Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Asian cuisines and/or the influences of colonialism on local foodways will find the work useful. . . . Filled with descriptions of meals and dishes likely to get the culinarily-minded reader drooling. And almost any non-academic writer planning to do food-related research anywhere in the world could take something away from the final chapter, which discusses the practicalities of this type of research.” —Robyn Eckhardt, author of EatingAsia

The Epidemiological Imagination

The Epidemiological Imagination
Author: Ashton, John
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1994-09-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0335191002

Public health is once again in the spotlight after several decades of being eclipsed by high tech, individually-oriented medical science. The reasons for this are not hard to find - the ever escalating costs of medical care, growing disillusionment with the return on investment, particularly for the poorer sections of the community, and a growing recognition of the importance of health promotion and preventative strategies which focus on the environmental and behavioural determinants of health and disease. At the heart of the public health perspective is an emphasis on understanding whole populations through the application of epidemiological analysis. This reader addresses the need to make available some of the classics of epidemiology to the new generations of students who are now trained in public-health, and to share with them the excitement of the epidemiological method. There is a wealth of experience in our collective public-health past and as we shape the new public health there is a danger of ignoring lessons from the old. By drawing on the choices of leading contemporary epidemiologists in selecting published papers both old and new, this volume aims to make the classics accessible to teachers and students alike.

Latin American Popular Culture Since Independence

Latin American Popular Culture Since Independence
Author: William H. Beezley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1442212543

This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Exploring such themes and events as funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food, a group of leading historians examines the ways that a wide range of individuals with copious, at times contradictory, motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. The authors analyze case studies from Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Trinidad-Tobago, tracing as well how their examples resonate in the rest of the region. They show how people could and did find opportunities to escape, if only occasionally, their daily drudgery, making lives for themselves of greater variety than the constant quest for dominance, drive for profits, orknee-jerk resistance to the social or economic order so often described in cultural studies. Instead, this rich text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expressions of popular culture in Latin America.