Review of Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya by Jon Holtzman

Abstract

This book unexpectedly frustrated me and at the same time delighted me which is not unlike what the author, Jon Holtzman, wants to convey about Samburu food, that is, its ambivalence and contradictions. The book is a compendium of several years of research in Samburu, and some of the materials have been taken from journal articles, reassembled into a book. Those interested in understanding more about pastoral diet intake and nutritional status will be disappointed however. This book is not about that, though there is a short mention to it in Chapters 2 and 9 (without references). Rather, this book is about the Samburu way of viewing their world as seen through food. We see broad cultural patterns and changes in those patterns through the mundane daily experience of food and eating. For those people who are food insecure, food is perhaps an excellent metaphor for life as Samburu becomes socialized into their culture of hunger. The book is thus about the cultural significance surrounding food and how people of various ages and gender socially manipulate its production (livestock and the superiority of a diet of milk, meat, and blood), its processing (raw versus cooked), its consumption (who consumes what types of food), and its changes. Food possesses values, practices, and social relations and reveals cultural changes, and Holtzman nicely navigates this realm of understanding.