Practices and Habits
The Construction and Everyday Life Practice of Breakfast Culture in Taiwan
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hsu Chia-Ling
Breakfast is often regarded as the most important meal of the day. However, when we examine how people eat their breakfast, we can easily find out that its eating places and meals are influenced more easily by their working time or the change of daily schedule than lunch and dinner. For Taiwanese, the time, the place of eating breakfast and the content of breakfast are all characterized by a great diversity. Taiwanese breakfast represents the authentic taste of Taiwan, a taste that mixes local cuisine and exotic cuisine. Therefore, this article analyzes how the breakfast culture develops in Taiwan and its socialization. First, I use the theory of “bodily experience” to investigate the way people choose their food for breakfast and the reasons cause the changes as time goes on and the differences of the social form in a historical perspective. These investigations reveal how social, economic and political elements influence the breakfast culture. Second, Michel de Certeau's concepts of strategies and tactics are applied to examine how people overcome the restrictions of time and place due to working and social rhythm to eat breakfast. By interviews and fieldwork with people in different professions, ages and living place, and the breakfast shop owners, the study explores the relation between Taiwanese breakfast culture and the transformation of Taiwan society. Furthermore, the study seeks to distinguish features of breakfast culture in Taiwan, and how the Taiwanese food culture is disseminated overseas.
Tonic Foods in Folk Nutrition: Eating Foods for Perceived Health Benefit and Risk
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karol Chandler Ezell
Folk systems of nutrition and medicine are important influences on dietary choices. Cultural traditions include a variety of foods that are consumed because they are believed to provide specific benefits for culturally-defined health concerns. These special foods can be classified as “tonics,” a folk category and widely used constituent of traditional and folk nutritional and medicinal systems around the world. These tonic foods have an important culinary role not only because of their role in traditional cuisine, but because they reveal culturally salient fears and concerns over health. Some foods may take on faddish popularity as “good” or protective and actually cause detrimental effects because they are consumed to excess or in place of healthier nutritional practices. Understanding what role tonics play in folk nutrition is important in interpreting food choices and understanding healthy and unhealthy nutritional practices. This paper presents a brief conceptual framework for tonics with examples of different categories of tonic foods, then demonstrates prescriptive eating examples from regional folk cuisines from the Southern U.S.
Umami: Deciphering the Peranakan Taste
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kar Lee Chan
Peranakan generally refers to people of mixed Chinese, Malay and Indonesian heritages, and most of them trace their origin to 15th century Malacca. Today, most of their cultural identities become blurred along with global migration and interracial marriages, yet leaving culinary taste distinguishable. A key condiment from Malacca, Belacan (a kind of fermented shrimp paste), is considered the key enhancer of the Peranakan taste, in which, I argue, the sensory taste of umami dominates over others. Despite the fact that Peranakan studies have attracted remarkable academic interests, foci on its unique taste are few. This study thus seeks to draw on scholarships of senses of taste by analyzing Peranakan cookbooks and interviewing Peranakan chefs to decipher the unique taste of Peranakan identities.
