Culinary Knowledge Research Articles

Tasting but not Tasting: MasterChef Australia and Vicarious Consumption

This article explores how people “taste” food media in order to develop cultural taste. It examines the vicarious consumption practices of three households of the popular reality television talent quest, MasterChef Australia (MCA). Vicarious consumption is the enjoyment of something, in this case gourmet food, through a third party (Veblen). The paper argues that the audience’s use of vicarious consumption is an empowering practice. As such, the article challenges Veblen’s negative view of vicarious consumption – the sentiment of which continues to underpin contemporary reality television and food media discourse (see Rousseau). Furthermore, this article expands upon Adema’s exploration of the practice in relation to food television in which she highlights that households gain more pleasure from watching food television rather than cooking and eating. Each audience member engaged in vicarious consumption and used MCA in conjunction with other food media for different reasons. For instance, one viewer used vicarious consumption to control her food intake, while another gained nostalgic pleasure from food media. These approaches to vicarious consumption allow the MCA viewers to negotiate conflicting discourses of cultural taste to construct a positive identity for themselves as "everyday foodies." "Everyday foodies" are individuals who embrace and incorporate an appreciation of gourmet food culture into their busy lifestyles, but are limited by time, money, health or confidence.

Constructing Culinary Knowledge

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period rife with social change for both the domains of food production and consumption, with significant consequences for how we know food today. Yet the ways in which culinary knowledge became standardized beyond cooking schools and commercial cookbooks remains largely undisclosed, particularly in rural households. Much of the existing cookbook literature relies on cookbooks that originate from urban locations. To explore how knowledge about food at the household and community level changed during this time, this article examines rural community cookbooks published in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan between 1893 and 1956. The findings suggest that contributors embraced the changing food landscape, as reflected in their enthusiastic adoption of processed products, but their culinary knowledge may have differed from that of their urban counterparts due to a lack of access to markets or affordable ingredients combined with continued reliance on local food environments.

Cookbooks—Ancient and Contemporary

Cookbooks are among the most informative sources we have for the study of food, culinary arts, and social history, but these are complex documents and yield up their insights only after careful, attentive, and diligent reading. We begin with the question, “What is meant by culinary knowledge?” as an example of engaging in theoretical enquiry. Having maintained that, to say that one knows this or that is to claim the right to be sure of it.

James Bond: International man of gastronomy?

Abstract This article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. In particular, it examines how the author uses Bond’s culinary knowledge and habits of consumption as an important constituent of his hero’s character. Similarly, the food choices of other characters, notably villains, are shown to be linked, by Fleming, to core aspects of their identity - principally their ethnicity. Bond’s impulse to observe and classify, very much in evidence in the novels’ food sequences, is examined in terms of the texts’ construction of Bond as a skilled identifier of signs.

“Watch Out How that Egg Runs”: Hemingway and the Rhetoric of American Road Food

Focusing on Hemingway’s experience before his Lost Generation years, this essay examines the gendered implications of “road food” in some of the Nick Adams stories and looks at how local culinary knowledge can forge both male autonomy and friendships, aiding survival in a world where, as Nick says in “The Battler,” “you got to be tough.”

Being a Female Cook in Mexico: an Approach to the Configuration of the Occupational Identities of Women in Mexican Kitchens at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Throughout the history of Mexico, traditional cuisine has been associated with women. Nowadays, current economic conditions have forced more women to extrapolate the domestic culinary knowledge to public kitchens. In addition, the rise and popularisation of culinary education has allowed the recruitment of more women in extra-domestic kitchens. While preparing food, these women share the way they see the world in the meanings they confer to the culinary work. These similarities make these women be perceived as social actors characterised by shared values, attitudes and capabilities. This article analyses the social dynamics that take place in the configuration of the occupational identities of women in Mexican public kitchens of the twenty-first century.

A Cookbook of Her Own

A Cookbook of Her Own

Ethnobiology for A Diverse World: Autobiology? The Traditional Ecological, Agricultural and Culinary Knowledge of US!

The prefix ethno (‘other’) might be considered one of the unfortunate flaws associated with the origins of our (inter-)discipline that has pervasively shaped the history of ethnobiology. Since the late 19th century, when John William Harshberger (1896) first coined the term ‘‘ethnobotany,’’ the prevailing strategy of most fieldworkers trained in ethnobiology has been to go and bear witness to some other culture’s knowledge of plants and animals. We would be remiss to ignore the blatantly colonial or imperialistic tone of some of the earliest ethnobotanical studies. They were explicitly undertaken to either a) learn what of value could be extracted from another culture’s natural resource base as export crops, or b) learn how immigrants could take cues from native residents on how to make a living on their shared home ground, even as some of those immigrants usurped water and harvested native plants and wildlife from the homelands of the people that they were studying. As my fellow Arab-American Edward Said (1993:5) once wrote, ‘‘We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.’’ Readers of Said’s Orientalism (1978) will remember his contention that portrayals of Arabs and Persians as ‘‘the other’’ –whether those portrayals represent them as primitives or as exotic sophisticates– historically served as implicit justifications for both European and North American political and colonial ambitions. The same can be said of English-, Spanish-, French- and Portuguese-speaking immigrants to the ‘‘New World,’’ who may have either villified or romanticized indigenous peoples of the Americas as being in some timeless homeostatic balance with the natural world. It both trivializes and simplifies their more nuanced knowledge and their complex interactions –positive and negative– with the biota of the Americas. One way out of this intellectual trap that many ethnobiologists have discussed and practiced is to devote time to encouraging (and in some cases, assisting) members of a particular cultural community to describe their own traditions from an emic view anchored in local language, belief, behavior and custom. Perhaps there is no better example of this in 20th-century ethnobiology than Ian Saen Majnep’s (Majnep et al. 1977) collaboration with ethnobiologists Ralph Bulmer and Christopher Healey, Birds of My Kalam Country. And yet, there is another pathway that ethnobiologists can and should take, and that is the investigation of the terms and underlying principles of ethnobiological classification and resource management which can be found

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low-income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class-based and racial differences in the food system.

Sensory perception of salmon and culinary sauces – An interdisciplinary approach

Sauces play an important role in the sensory perception of meals. The combination of sauce and other foods in a meal might cause sensory interactions which change sensory attributes and the overall impression of the meal. The main aim of this study was to investigate the effects of culinary sauces, with different levels and combinations of the basic tastes, on the sensory attributes of salmon using mixed tasting technique. Seventeen different combinations of salmon and culinary sauces were evaluated by a trained panel at Nofima using descriptive analysis. The samples were analyzed in this sequence; first the salmon, then the sauce and finally the combination of salmon and sauce. Significant changes were found in salmon for all combinations, most importantly; bitter, acid and salty sauces significantly reduced salmon flavor, while salty sauce also reduced fish-oil flavor. Bitter, acid and salty sauces significantly increased the attribute complexity and bitter sauce reduced the attribute harmony. This study can be seen as a model for product development combining experimental design and sensory analysis with culinary knowledge. Results may be applied for tailoring fish meals for specific consumer segments.

Cooking, Food, and Masculinity: Palestinian Men in Israeli Society

This article examines the relationships between food and masculinity as experienced by Palestinian men, citizens of Israel. Their preoccupation with food reveals issues of masculinity and identity via two complementary streams. By defining domestic cooking as a feminine task, Palestinian men strengthen their domination over women. Conversely, in the public sphere, men use cooking as a means of breadwinning. Their cooking intertwines with issues of identity formation and relations of domination. As restaurateurs, Palestinian men refrain from serving domestic dishes. Thus, they show respect to Palestinian women and simultaneously preserve the traditional distinctions between home food and restaurant food. They view their upholding of their culinary knowledge as a major contribution to the limited appropriation of Palestinian food into the popular Jewish culinary repertoire. Consequently, they appear as the guardians of Palestinian cuisine and culture who prevent their diffusion into Israeli culinary common knowledge.

Quelle carte pour quel territoire ? Impossibles et nécessaires : les inventaires du patrimoine alimentaire

Our article focuses on the significant issues underlying the symposium “Compiling a food heritage inventory: existing knowledge, methods and perspectives” which was held in Tours in 2009. As a consequence of the generalized heritagisation process which has been gaining momentum for the last few decades, culinary knowledge and know-how are now widely accepted as a cultural asset worthy of preservation. This development has led to the establishing of important inventories carried out by researchers in the human and social sciences on all five continents; we propose here a brief overview of this work. It must, however, be underlined that such maps of the world food heritage find themselves faced with difficulties which are essentially coterminal with them: in fact, these inventories try to grasp something which is constantly eluding them. We find ourselves therefore in a position where we must now question the use of inventories and the reasoning behind them.

Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition

Stephan Palmie My contribution to this special issue takes its origins in a footnote to an article on culinary metaphors in the modeling of African American cultural history that I published a few years ago (Palmie 2005). It was a long footnote on (what I think is) a fascinating instance of gastrographic revisionism very much apropos our common theme of “hybrid heritage” and even more interesting in light of current discussions about intangible cultural property. What I am concerned with in the following is, in principle at least, a well-known theme in the anthropology of food and cuisine, viz. the treatment of specific foods and preparations as emblematic markers of collective identities. Ever since Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1894), we have known that culinary practices can (and often do) serve as powerful vehicles for collective projections of a common history and future. Yet while much attention has been paid to the socializing function of commensality or patterned food avoidance, little attention (or so it seems to me) has been paid to the way in which culinary knowledge—shall we say “recipes”?— function to demarcate social boundaries, especially if and when they become objectified as intellectual property or intangible cultural heritage. This, however, is exactly what African American cookbook-writing advocates of conceptions of “culinary Pan-Africanism,” or even more radically, Afrocentric proponents of the idea of the willful denial of the African origins of much of the world’s high cuisines, have been arguing for some two decades. But let me establish a bit of context first. At least since the 1960s, US African American foodways—especially the culinary complex known as “soul food”—have been subject to explicit and often highly self-conscious politicization. As both the black writer and activist Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1966) and the founder of the Nation of Islam, the honorable Elijah Muhammad (1967) clearly recognized in their own very different ways, there is a vexing arbitrariness to the culinary signifier: eating corn bread, collard greens, ham hocks, or chitterlings by itself does not constitute an assertion or rejection of certain identities, subject positions, or visions of collective history. What does is the symbolic act of situating these same foods within narratives about their significance for patterns of commensal affinity among the oppressed and excluded (in Baraka’s case), or about hybrid heritage

What's Cooking in America?

This study looks at cookbooks published in the United States as narrators of ethnicity. It contends that cookbooks are social texts through which ethnic culinary knowledge is articulated into the dominant culture. Cookbooks reveal the means through which ethnicity is detached from its holders, modified by agencies of the dominant culture and reassigned an ethnic version. Through this process, food writers reduce ethnicity to the level of practical knowledge made available for sharing among people of various backgrounds. The study of the propagation of ethnic culinary culture in America is of particular interest because its discipline entails a changing negotiation about American (mainstream) and ethnic cuisines.

“Strange People But They Sure Can Cook!”

This article follows a group of Indonesian migrant women in Sydney as they planned and ran a cookery course at a local adult education college. It shows how a focus on domestic culinary knowledge revealed important understandings of their lived experience. In particular, it argues that this knowledge can act as a mediator and reference point for the journey the women have made in moving to Australia, both marking and enabling this form of “travel.” The shift from the private sphere of the household, to the rather more public arena of the classroom, also underlines the process of exchange (and the attendant risk and vulnerability) involved in cross-cultural hospitality.

Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

fish is a political act. --Janice Mirikitani, Why Is Preparing Fish a Political Act? (86) Proposing a Gastronomic Theory of Literature, Brad Kessler ponders a friend's observation that every good novel she'd ever read opened with a food scene in very first or second chapter (149). He questions how these early meals function, whether they stimulate reader's appetite for larger meal ahead (151). For Kessler, food in great fiction opens doors double and triple (156). Discussing a scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which purchases a hot baked yam from a street vendor, Kessler notes its racialized significance: the yam is as packed with meaning as it is with pulp. Eating it openly, on street, is an act of defiance and liberation for narrator (156). The rejects internalized impulse repress his pleasure, thinking himself, to hell with being ashamed of what you liked (266). As this example demonstrates, writings about food and eating may serve draw reader into racialized subjectivity, but they may also complicate and appetites. Describing his own early response reading about Wang Lung's hunger in Pearl S. Buck's novel The Good Earth, Kessler states: His hunger became mine. Some chapters later, when Wang finally eats a handful of hot rice, and then wheat bread folded around a sprig of garlic, I could barely contain myself. I ran kitchen, ravenous, ransacking cupboards for white rice, jasmine tea, bags of take-out noodles (anything that seemed Chinese) trying fill myself with what Wang Lung lacked. I didn't know what do next: read or eat. (148) Kessler slips into what Lisa Marie Heldke refers as food colonialism, as Chineseness becomes a commodified quality that can be approximated with a variety of foodstuffs easily located in his well-stocked American cupboard. Such an impulse consume Chinese food approaches Orientalist desire, as Rey Chow discusses it in her notes on a museum exhibit of 10,000 Chinese restaurant menus: [A]ll those items that signify 'Chineseness' even while ingredients and methods of preparation may be 'inauthentic' or nonexistent in China--are not unlike ideologically suspect literary, historical, and cultural texts that, as Said rightly cautioned, depict non-Western world with implicit Western motives and desires (20). Questions of desiring, and consuming Other remain unaddressed by Kessler's gastronomic theory. (1) In Asian American literature, food as metaphor frequently constructs and reflects relationships racialized subjectivity and also addresses issues of authenticity, assimilation, and desire. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has argued, in this literature first generation is often preoccupied with food as necessity--associated with nourishment, staples, and survival while second views food as extravagance--excess, treats, and desire. Yet short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) complicate this binary; snacks and treats consumed by characters, and even an abundance of ingredients, can reflect those characters' poverty (both monetary and emotional) and isolation. Although food functions as an important metaphor throughout collection, culinary knowledge and practice is especially important in A Temporary Matter, Mrs. Sen's, and This Blessed House. In these stories food is means for characters assert agency and subjectivity in ways that function as an alternative dominant culture. Lahiri's female immigrant characters, in particular, work complicate comfortable association between home and food. As Gayatri Gopinath notes, the centrality of [male-male or father-son] trope as primary trope in imagining diaspora invariably displaces and elides female diasporic subjects (5). …

The Growing Importance of Food and Culinary Knowledge and Skills in Dietetics Practice

Food and nutrition professionals must convey the message to consumers that healthy food choices can be made while enjoying taste and indulgences for food. In practice, RDs are uniquely positioned to merge the nutrition food pyramid with the flavor pyramid. Dietitians need the competence to profile foods consumers like, assist with meal choices and purchases, and modify food and meal choices to assure clients’ satisfaction. Whether in clinical, community, foodservice or more non-traditional settings, the RD that is competent in speaking food and culinary language is more effective in enabling consumers to make the food/ health

Notes From the CKD Kitchen: Restaurant Dining

As a chronic kidney disease patient, have you wondered how to dine in a variety of restaurants guilt-free? I have received many questions on this subject lately, which inspired me to share my strategies for a successful dining experience using my culinary knowledge. I always try to call the restaurant ahead of time and explain to them my dietary guidelines and the reason for these guidelines. If I'm not able to give the restaurant any advance notice, I follow four simple steps once I arrive at that restaurant to create a wonderful meal that will follow my doctor's and dietitian's nutritional guidelines.

Learning to taste: Child socialization and food habits in France

Learning to appreciate food in France means learning to make distinctions. It means acquiring a specialized vocabulary to talk about food and enough practical, sensory experiences with different types of food to be able to compare and judge foods. Data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Loire Valley town have been used analyze the ways in which a group of French children were expected to broaden their palates, begin to obtain different types of practical culinary knowledge, and gain mastery of “taste”-related talk. There were three different but inter-related aspects of what in France is known as “ l’apprentissage du goût ,” which one could translate as “learning about taste” or, simply, “taste mastery”, where the word “taste” (“ le goût ”) relates to cultural and class-based meanings in France. Specific examples were found of how children acquired such concepts through participation in food-related experiences in the school lunchroom, in the home kitchen, and around the family dinner table. From the school lunch producer's intent to educate young palates by creating special “taste week” menus and flipping crêpes with Grandma, to impassioned appeals by parents to eat “good” food, children's hearts, minds and tastebuds were the objects of many taste socialization efforts.

Cuisines of poverty as means of empowerment: Arab food in Israel

This paper suggests looking at cuisines of poverty as practical and political systems practiced by urban and rural Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is an important and interesting case study within which political and economical considerations govern and enhance the development, change, and acceptance of culinary knowledge. Cuisines of poverty operate in two simultaneous arenas. As systems of practical knowledge, they repeatedly center on the ability to maintain the traditional kitchen, turning it into a tool-kit out of which information is recruited upon need. Simultaneously, cuisines of poverty reveal the inter-connection between the culinary discourse and the political one. It is where issues such as access to land, national and ethnic identity, and means to participation in the dominant culture are of major concern. The analysis of cuisines as operating on two complementary discourses contributes to the understanding of the relationship between food and the arena of power.