Recognising, Safeguarding, and Promoting Food Heritage: Challenges and Prospects for the Future of Sustainable Food Systems

Dauro Mattia Zocchi,Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco,Paolo Corvo,Andrea Pieroni

doi:10.3390/su13179510

Dauro Mattia Zocchi, Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179510

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Abstract

The safeguarding and promotion of food heritage are often considered as a possible way for achieving social and cultural sustainability objectives. This literature review investigates some of the dynamics underlying the heritagisation of food and explores the risks of this process. It focuses mainly on anthropological, geographical, and sociological publications. Overall, it aims to shed light on the strengths and limitations of food heritagisation regarding the improvement of the socio-cultural sustainability of the food system. The analysis highlights cross-cutting risks, namely the omission of tangible and intangible elements of the local food system, and the exclusion of key stakeholders from the recognition and institutionalisation of food heritage. The review highlights the strict interdependence between intangible and tangible elements during food heritagisation, and assesses how local and global interactions can activate and shape this process. It sheds light on the need to pay more attention to the factors, actors, and relationships underpinning the emergence and recognition of food and food-related elements as part of the local heritage.

Highlights

Food heritagisation “refers to the transformation of [food], places and practices into cultural heritage as values are attached to them, essentially describing heritage as a process” [1] (p. 26)
This study focuses on food heritagisation and the valorisation of food heritage with the aim of reflecting on their potential impacts on the social and cultural sustainability of food systems
The findings show that the variability in the results of food heritagisation is strictly linked to the strong embeddedness of this process in contextualised socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics, and in their evolution across time and space

Summary

Introduction

Food heritagisation “refers to the transformation of [food], places and practices into cultural heritage as values are attached to them, essentially describing heritage as a process” [1] (p. 26). In 2010, the inclusion of the Mediterranean diet, Mexican cuisine, and the gastronomic meal of the French in UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” list recognised the need to protect food and culinary cultures given their importance as identity markers, as well as their role in fostering the economic, political, and social empowerment of local communities [2,3]. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of social scientists, especially in the field of food studies. It is what Geyzen [4] called a “heritage turn”, that is, the rise of a strand of research exploring the link between identity crises, attempts at reidentification, and the development of heritage-based projects linked to food and the gastronomic milieu

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