Thanks to a Fulbright Specialist grant and with the support of my home institution, New York University, I will be working with Xavier Medina, UNESCO Chair on Food, Culture and Development at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and with Gloria Rodriguez, a NYU alumna and herself a Fulbright scholarship recipient. We will be exploring various approaches and processes that determine the creation of food heritage. Of course, we will be reflecting about food heritage itself, its nature, and its uses. In fact, different perceptions and approaches to food heritage have emerged around the world.
Very different processes take place by which food products, preparations or consumption customs are identified as valuable by a community and marked as such for an external audience of consumers and visitors. Against this background, we will be assessing how food expressions – including the material culture on which they are based – are categorized around the world in different categories. For the next two weeks, I will be sharing this work on this blog; my personal reflections are also based on my previous research, published in several articles and in my 2017 book Knowing Where It Comes From: Labeling Traditional Foods to Compete in a Global Market. The attention to tradition and heritage, and how communities experience and perceive it, is also at the center of my research project in Poland, about which I often write.
As a reaction to the dominance of mass-produced products, among the most affluent strata of post-industrial societies purchasing choices play an increasingly important role in defining identities of individuals and communities. Rural and artisanal products and practices are embraced as cultural harbors that offer emotional sanctuary against globalization and its unstoppable circulation of goods, people, finance, and ideas. Characteristics that in the past were cause for shame, such as the simplicity of dishes, the rusticity of ingredients, and the connection with the rural and working class social environments, have turned into major advantages in the processes of valuation that characterize contemporary foodie culture.
Those same elements are now woven into stories that provide depth and value to food consumption, well beyond quality and sensory appreciation. They play a central role in food consumer culture as an expression of what Pine and Gilmore defined as “experience economy,” in which the goals of production and business services are meant to provide customers not only with objects and services, but also with the experiences and memories that accompany them (Pine and Gilmore 1999).
As a consequence, when it comes to food the value of a product is often determined not only by its inherent material and gustatory traits, but also by its meaning, its history, and its rootedness in particular communities across the world, about which consumers can obtain information and knowledge. These dynamics provide consumers with a sense of connection with the origins of what they eat, compensating for a certain sense of loss. Among affluent foodies, traditions and culinary heritage have emerged as among the most important features that help coping with the dysfunctions of the contemporary food systems, even when such traditions are “updated’ and “elevated” to better reflect the aesthetic and cultural expectations of those who can afford them.
Tradition is both as a field of social action, something that people do, and as the objects of such action. In the first sense, tradition is a system of values shaping the transmission of knowledge and the cultural reproduction of a social formation that as a community of practice shares and continuously negotiates ingredients, dishes, techniques, and ideas about them in a specific setting. While tradition is a field of social action, the word also refers to the object of such action. Among the practices and customs from the past that are in some form still performed in the present, only a few are embraced and turned into objects of tradition, something that is acknowledged by a specific group of people or a community as a particularly relevant part of their past and valued as different and special, against the background of all that is considered less relevant or irrelevant.
However, as literary critic Eric Hobsbawm observed, traditions are at times “invented,” as a “response to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition”. The desire for food traditions is routinely exploited by unscrupulous advertising and marketing, building on the nostalgia for the good old days that may have never been experienced in the first place. However, communities and individuals appear to understand that traditions change over time. The extent to which such alterations are deemed acceptable and not threatening is determined by discursive negotiations both within the community itself and with outsiders. Awareness – as limited as it may be – about the constructed nature of traditions, which often offer ideological legitimations to cultural, social, and political formations, as well as the fact that traditions change over time, does not make them less emotionally real for those who partake in them.
In the next few days I will be sharing more thoughts about food traditions and how they are transformed into heritage.