Can food heritage be activated as a development tool to promote and support local productions and traditions, both nationally and abroad? What negotiations and compromises are necessary to make it available and understandable to consumers?
During the time spent in Spain for the Fulbright Specialist research project, I reflected on the motivations behind the growing interest in food heritage, in its political undertones, the methods to identify it, and the theoretical issues about the concept itself. I also had the opportunity to interview Gloria Rodriguez, initiator of the research project with Xavier Medina from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), about Eat Spain Up, an initiative she spearheaded in past years to promote the culinary traditions of Spain abroad. It was an opportunity to look at food heritage not only as a tool for intercultural communication, but also an instrument for the promotion of tourism and rural productions. For the sake of transparency, I participated as a speaker in two of the events.
Eat Spain Up came out of Rodriguez’s master thesis in Cultural Management at UOC, finished in 2011. Her focus was the communication of cultural heritage through food. She realized that Spain was not using cultural diplomacy at all, which she thought could provide a good introduction to Spanish culture at large, increasing the interest of foreign audiences to know more about Spain and Spaniards.
Although there were cultural institutions and cultural programming abroad, such as the Institutos Cervantes that Spain manages as centers for arts and cultures, there was practically no mention of food beyond some tastings after the cultural events. Rodriguez believed that food could have a more powerful role. At the time, Spanish institutions were starting to highlight Spanish chefs, but Rodriguez did not think that the choice was representative of Spanish culinary culture but instead provided a limited view- if not a distorted image – of what people do in their homes, in their every day lives. The interest in high-end cuisine was very artistic and impactful, but disconnected from popular culture, despite it was undeniable that certain elements were trickling down to larger audiences beyond fine-dining customers. Rodriguez was looking instead for “something that was more representative, a more faithful image,” of Spanish food culture and Spanish culture at large.
Gran Canaria Day at Eat Spain up! Stockholm
Together with her husband Luis Miguel Rodriguez as co-director, in 2013 Rodriguez initiated Eat Spain Up as a program that was food-centered but also had a cultural approach. At the time Spain was at the worst of its economic crisis, so the first challenge was to figure out what the funding structure could potentially be, and what private and public entities could contribute. She realized that for this to happen the program also had to contribute to more material economic goals, including the promotion of tourism and food products abroad, two areas that could be easily and directly impacted. She felt there was a need to work together and help the country recover, even if it meant that various institutions and sectors had to collaborate around objectives and goals of different stakeholders, sharing resources and results.
At that point Rodriguez applied to funding from the Ministry of Culture, which had never been used to anything related to food. She did not get it but she asked feedback and received detailed suggestions on how she could improve her proposal. The next year she got the grant, which however had to be integrated with external funding from other sources outside of the Ministry of Culture. The challenge was to identify who were the right partners to involve, not only in terms of funding but also of content, know-how, and knowledge of audiences abroad. Rodriguez found herself interacting with tourism and trade offices, as well as the regions in which Spain is administratively divided into.
The first event took place in Stockholm in March 2014, involving local restaurants and a publishing house that brought cookbooks to the local Instituto Cervantes, where an exhibition was also organized. Rodriguez was fully aware it was a pilot, following a design-thinking approach and working in iterations that folded the findings and results of previous experiences into new ones. The goal was to determine who the partners could be, what events worked best, how the audiences reacted, and if the initiatives managed to convey a faithful image of Spanish cuisine.
Four editions of Eat Spain Up took place between 2014 through 2017: after Stockholm, also in Oslo, New York City, and Washington DC, every year in a different city. The underlying idea was to understand different audiences in distinct places as part of the learning process. The events could vary from three days to 5 weeks, without a fixed format but rather responding to the needs of particular audiences and partners. The contents for each event was decided in collaboration with the partners, ranging from public institutions to importers, restaurants, and culinary schools. Events could include master classes for culinary students and professional chefs, round tables, screenings of films and documentary about Spanish food, and exhibitions. Every year different regions and food producers participated. The goal was to generate flexible knowledge that would be easy to apply and reproduce.
Morcilla (blood sausage). East Spain Up Washington DC
Making different regional entities – from tourism to agriculture – work collaboratively was very difficult as they were not speaking among themselves. The bureaucratic areas are still very compartmentalized, as there are no official communication procedures and links. It is up to the person in charge with each office to decide what to do. Of course, the issue of who decides what products and recipes would be visible became immediately apparent. In other words, who defines food heritage?
Some of the Spanish regions, in particularly if tourism offices took the lead, were very keen on the modern aspects of culinary culture; other regions instead had no interest in that approach, but wanted rather to showcase traditions, which they thought were better to valorize products. Partners picked the products to show abroad quite organically, involuntarily reflecting what was accepted as a given among the people of their regions. In fact, many products in Spain are widely identified with specific locations, and many consumers are aware of where those specialties come from: Morcilla de Burgos, Salmorejo de Cordoba, gazpacho de Andalucia. Sometimes they are covered by Geographical Indications, sometimes they are not. Rodriguez argues it is a form of heritage that is alive and well. As Australian scholar Lara Anderson documented in her book Cooking Up the Nation, this state of affairs is the result of historical dynamics, removed enough in time that nobody remembers them, with the result that certain culinary elements are naturalized. As a resistance to French influence, starting from the early nineteenth century cookbooks in Spain were organized around regions, marking the beginning of the local bourgeois cuisine.
The institutions who were contributing money to Eat Spain Up events adopted different strategies. Some wanted to introduce products that were not available in the foreign location yet, while others preferred to increase the visibility of products that were already present. Extremadura, a main region for ham in Spain, took advantage of the event to get approval to import their hams into the US, which was not the case until then. Tourist offices instead tended to involve the highest level restaurant chefs possible, who often cooked in a modernist style, also because the political representative from the region attending the event wanted to be photographed with the chefs. Only in more recent years, local authorities in Spain have started choosing visible chefs that are doing traditional cuisines.
Ham from Extremadura. Eat Spain Up Washington DC
When asked how is it different to be a researcher and a curator in food heritage, Rodriguez states that she could not separate the two, because for her the communication of Spanish culinary culture abroad needs research. She wants to go beyond the marketing ideas prevalent in tourism and food industry, and have a more solid cultural analysis. But as the outcome of this kind of research is not limited to academia, it requires a different methodology to be translated into a more accessible language. “As an academic you live with the idea that generating knowledge is in itself valuable. But I am also a cultural manager and I need that to go beyond to create something, a product.”
Rodriguez is fully aware that, especially as there was little precedent in the area, she was shaping her object of knowledge. Conscious of her role as cultural intermediator, she was trying to be objective by looking at what people thought was valuable and what they had already identified, hoping that her opinions affected as little as possible the selection of the content. She knows she may not have been completely objective, as any curator is also a critic, adding value, creating value, and determining what is valuable. However, in the end her choices were determined by the goal of involving as many partners as possible, also because of the funding.
Moreover, she wanted to give the public a sense that she was not providing a definitive summary of Spanish food culture, but rather disperse pictures, prompting them to build their own discourse. The events were always partial, representing culinary elements found and performed in Spain, which had value for Spaniards. Nobody was trying to define food heritage from the bottom up, not from the point of view of the regional governments that decided what their food heritage is. The content of each event had to fulfill three premises: it had to represent geographical diversity (at least two provinces, to show that there was more than that, that is was a diverse culture); it aimed to show the coexistence of restaurant high-end culture with everyday practices, although tourists tend to be only exposed to the hospitality sector; it wanted to suggest the simultaneity of more traditional cuisines and contemporary, avant-garde gastronomy.
Overall, Rodriguez wanted to remind audiences abroad that Spanish traditional cuisine had not died. In fact, she feels she almost became an activist, in the sense that she was not only trying to understand what food heritage was and what elements were interesting to share with different audiences, but she was also striving to convince institutions and stakeholders that food was culture and heritage, it had cultural value, and it was a tool for intercultural dialogue.