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Parisian Vibrations: Place and Politics in Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's Depiction of France
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Siobhan Phillips, Jacquelin Greger
Criticism of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s groundbreaking 1970 cookbook, "Vibration Cooking," needs still more attention to the role of Paris to the text. Smart-Grosvenor’s book describes her culinary roots in the southern US and her culinary journeys among diasporic Black culture. Smart-Grosvenor’s most formative travel was her time in Paris, where she experienced some of the city's most politically and culturally tumultuous years. She joined flourishing Black artistic and intellectual communities of the time and was involved in the 1968 demonstrations advocating for social, political, and economic change. Change came through food, too; 1960s activism contributed to a shift in French culinary culture which promoted chefs’ autonomy and imagination. In her cookbook, Smart-Grosvenor argues both for individual creativity in food and a social/political activism grounded in cuisine; this revolution in cookery writing draws from—and transforms—her experience of Paris. Her connection of African American foodways to revisions of French culinary traditions emphasizes a larger point about the influence of African diasporic cuisine among transnational histories of food. To recognize fully how Smart-Grosvenor used her Parisian experience is to clarify her contribution to food history and the larger interpenetration of politics and food in the city’s postwar life. This points to other connections, in that time and place, of Black intellectual, activist, and artistic work with French cooking culture.
Street Kitchens and Social Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Street Food and Eating Practices in Inner-city Johannesburg View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sapana Sewpersad
The making and consumption of food are fundamental secular rituals that make up the everyday. The activity of eating is an inherently social activity. Eating practices and food are always mediated through social relations and vice-versa. This thesis is interested in the phenomenon of street food and economic exchange. Street food is an interesting, common food practice which is ancient and present in every civilisation, globally. Following this, street food is thus an important element that would make up the inner city of Johannesburg. This thesis is interested in interrogating what happens to the highly social events of sharing, giving and accepting food when it is mediated through economic exchange. This thesis seeks to understand how everyday food and eating practices facilitate a relationship between street vendors and their consumers. The main question of this thesis is; What kind of social relationships are formed and performed in the everyday preparing, selling, and consuming of street food in inner-city Johannesburg? Using participant observation and ethnographic methods, this thesis finds that whilst there is a definite economic aspect to vending, food fosters social relationships between vendors and their customers. There is a flexibility that is exhibited around price structure, there are cracks in the idea of vending being purely economic as social relationships are a factor in how profits are determined. The act of cooking takes on a maternal aspect, within this setting. This thesis further illustrates how close spatial proximity works to foster domestic commensality amongst the customers of the stall.
Transforming the Taste of a Place: The Innovation and Resilience of Taqueros in the Era of COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel Valle
Wes Avila, owner and chief of Guerrilla Tacos in Los Angeles, CA, insists that the only authentic aspect of taco making is its “inauthenticity.” A taco, he claims, is a “blank canvas.” This approach to cooking and eating has revolutionized both the L.A. food truck scene and how Mexican food is being perceived, prepared, and presented. In the past few years, Mexican food in Southern California has engaged in the local production of food in ways it has not been in recent memory in part because of COVID-19. The Los Angeles region has been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, and restaurant owners feel the pressure to be innovative and resilient. This paper explores how taqueros (or taco makers) have remained resilient by innovating “traditional” dishes that are often meat-based to vegan and vegetarian. Under COVID-19, meat and dairy have become expensive for many restaurants to purchase. The move to vegan and vegetarian has helped chiefs lower the cost of food and may improve the health and wellbeing of their communities. COVID-19 only further perpetuates the food inequalities already experienced in low-income and communities of color. However, as chiefs transition to COVID cooking norms, their everyday creative and meaningful engagement with food must also change. The “blank canvas” of the taco is being remade every day. This interpretive research explores how the human experiences and social contexts normalized under COVID-19 shape the social reality of taqueros and their patrons.
Subversive Sustainability in the Interstice: Urban Foraging in Rita Wong’s Forage and Ava Chin’s Eating Wildly View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yiyi He
I explore foraging poetics and politics in Wong’s Forage (2007) and Chin’s Eating Wildly (2014) through a trope of “interstice” from both its racial and environmental aspects. I show how the two writers of Chinese background discuss urban foraging in a similar yet paradoxically different way. I argue that urban foraging and its variants discussed here, such as foraging all forms of food substance in the physical world or even words and an art of writing which feed our minds in a metaphysical sense presents the flaneur of Chinese descent. Chinese Canadian/American environmental thinking is creating an interstice in both diasporic narratives and ecocriticism. It reveals a relational potential for “subversive” sustainability against hegemonic capitalist food regimes as well as spatial and environmental/food injustice. I will investigate how foraging, as a daily practice, and as a metaphor represented in literary works, provides a guideline of resilient foodways for urban dwellers, regardless of race, class, gender, and generation. The rich connotations embedded in foraging further dismantle the nature/culture, human/other-than-human divides. Wong’s speaker and Chin’s narrator are situated in this interstitial space. Both foraging discourses in their aesthetic, ethnic, and environmental complexities challenge dominant white foraging narratives. In their texts, Chineseness is subtly revealed through specific food discourses that present urban foraging as a subversive act. Gradually, through a healing process of foraging art, the protagonists rediscover and reconcile with their true self fully. I aim to unveil the rich implications urban foraging has eth(n)ically, environmentally, and aesthetically.
Cooking Up National Culture in Jamaica View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Keja Valens
In the first half of the twentieth century, led by an increasingly racially mixed upper class creole community, Jamaican cookbooks transition from hosting the projects of white creole West Indian women – community building, self-fashioning and “defense of native style” – to offering recipes for an independent national culture that embrace and hold up the creole as the confluence of African, Indigenous, European, and Asian traditions and as the foundational flavor of independence. This paper starts by tracing the shape and trajectory of this transition across four cookbooks published between Mrs. F.H. Watkins’s 1908 West India Recipes and the 1957 Farmer’s Food Manual whose publication marks a clear turn to recipes for an independent Jamaica. I argue that these cookbooks demonstrate continuity from the work of white Creoles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They exhibit the shifting definitions of the term Creole and notions of Creoleness as well as the grip of white Creole culture and power in Jamaica well past political independence. In the decade after the Farmer’s Food Manual, the Black Nationalist recipes that had been simmering finally came to the fore. The paper turns in its second half to examining the interplay between politics and cookbooks, national taste, and gustatory independence as it examines how cookbooks configure and reconfigure Jamaican cuisine as the centerpiece of the long British Empire, the new nation on the world stage, and black nationalism in the new world in conjunction with similar patterns in the political sphere.
Mondrian’s Neo-plasticism, Troisgros’ Nouvelle Cuisine, and the Shifting Spirit of Modernism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anthony Huffman
This research project stems in part from Jules Prown’s description of meals and food as diversions in mapping out the various facets of the study of material culture. Following Prown’s logic, food, as a cultural product, is worthy of scholarly inquiry and analysis. There is no singular academic discipline fully equipped to dissect food as a cultural product; therefore, multidisciplinary modes of thinking are required. What follows is precisely that, an experimental and interdisciplinary approach to the history of art, gastronomy, and modernist studies. I hope to demonstrate that the application of art-historical methodologies to objects typically considered outside the realm of visual culture to be a fruitful and worthwhile endeavor. By analyzing artist manifestos in tandem with recipes and chefs’ statements, and conducting visual analysis of paintings alongside composed dishes, I believe new forms of innovative scholarship can be generated. The production of new forms of knowledge can shed fresh light on artistic traditions that are not usually considered together.
Hospitality and Commensality in the Craft Beer Scene of São Paulo, Brazil: A Manager's View View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Kenzo Falck, Elizabeth Kyoko Wada
Commensality, as a domain of hospitality, presents itself in moments of food and beverage sharing. Among these beverages, the enjoyment of beer occurs, collectively, in bars and restaurants specialized in craft beers. This sector grows continuously in Brazil and worldwide, and the present work investigate the influence of hospitality in craft beer commerce. In the national market, the city of São Paulo - Brazil has a relevant focus in the artisanal brewing medium. This exploratory-descriptive research analyzed aspects of hospitality and commensality on the consumption of craft beers. The objective of this paper is to analyze how aspects of hospitality are present in commensality moments involving craft beers, from the perspective of owners of the Pinheiros and Vila Madalena beer pole, in São Paulo, Brazil. This study is qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive. The mean of research used was the field research. The research used in-depth interviews with managers of breweries, and also participant observation. Bibliographical survey based the theoretical reference. The last step was the crossing of the collected information, in order to obtain the micro focus of the brewery pole. As empirical results, the existence, proof and application of intrinsic characteristics of the hospitality and commensality areas of study were observed as strategic differentials of beer businesses in the studied pole. As theoretical findings, evidence that supports Giacoman's practical model, and the theoretical model of Lashley, Lynch and Morrison's hospitality lenses were also verified when applied to the local brewing business.
Tastes of Home: Representations of the Role of Food in Refugee Homemaking Practices in the UK View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alisha Mathers
Coined by Parama Roy, gastropoetics is a term and analytic practice that has been adopted by scholars in the field of postcolonial studies to foreground the unique relationships that communities have with their cuisines—specifically the processes of growing, cooking, and eating food—and the sensory/spatial impacts of such practices. Although ethnographic studies on refugee communities have acknowledged refugees’ reliance on food to create a sense of home in exile, the study of gastropoetics in refugee contexts remains to be explored. This paper problematises the practice of gastropoetics – highlighting how the practice has romanticised spaces and the role of the senses within those spaces – and to demonstrate how the practice can be utilised to analyse representations of refugee domestic spaces. This paper examines representations of the sensory aspects of refugee homemaking practices in the UK in the cookbook A Taste of Home: Home-cooked recipes from Syrian refugees living in the UK (2020) and Helen Taylor’s ethnographic work, Refugees and the Meaning of Home (2015). This article examines how the cookbook and ethnographic text represent the significance of taste in the process of refugee homemaking; and explores the ways in which cooking contributes to the creation of sanctuary their domestic spaces in the UK.
Featured The Buru Transition: The Deodorization of A Kapampangan Fermented Tradition View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie Narciso
Many fermented foods are notorious for their stinky odor. Buru, a fermented rice and fish concoction from the Kapampangan region of the Philippines is no different. The cat vomit-likened condiment is associated with a characteristic stink or “bantot”. Despite the smell, buru has become well-entrenched in the food culture— enjoyed best as accompaniment for grilled fish and steamed-vegetables. The stinky smellscape however appears to be in transition with both product and olfactory aesthetic suggesting buru deodorization. To demonstrate this sensory transition, this paper follows the material transformation of buru, and the smell preferences for buru among its consumers and makers in Candaba, Pampanga. It identifies the rise in popularity and continuous improvements of commercial buru as predominant factors in the changes of the buru osmocosm. The shift to higher salt concentration fermentations, fresh fish usage and commercial rice specifically have collectively generated a “clean buru” discourse. Such discourse not only establishes odorless buru as quality standard for buru-making but also reinforces stinky buru as a panolfacton, a social measure of a buru-maker’s skill and moral character. This paper concludes with the not so favorable implications of buru deodorization in fermentation practice and more broadly in food and nutrition security and sustainability.
Exploring Experiences of Mealtimes and Food: A Photo Elicitation Study with Occupational Therapy Graduate Students View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kristin Winston, Dorothy Enomoto, Sarah Titcomb, McKenna Bender
This study explored the lived experiences of graduate occupational therapy students regarding mealtimes and food through the use of qualitative photo elicitation. Our primary aim was to examine perceptions of mealtimes and food. This qualitative study used an ethnographic approach with six graduate students between the ages of 23-28, living off campus, attending a Masters of Science Occupational Therapy Program. Participants took and selected five to six photos they felt best represented their experiences. Each participant was interviewed by one researcher, engaging in a semi-structured interview via ZOOM discussing selected photos. All interviews were recorded and transcribed for coding and analysis. All data was stored on a secure Google drive. The meaning of mealtimes for participants was influenced by culture, temporal factors, and resources. Themes pulled from this research included: “It’s all about emotional eating”, “It’s not just about where you eat, but who you eat with”, “It takes a village!”, “Mealtime is a sensational experience”, and “Taking a trip down savory lane!”. As every mealtime is unique to the person, one can gain an understanding about individual mealtime perceptions through photographic exploration and discussion. It is important to look at the form, function, and meaning of mealtimes and food in order to better understand and facilitate participation in this important daily occupation. This study demonstrated community is present in mealtimes through who we eat with and the memories food evoked. Contextually mealtimes sparked emotions and sensations that were central to the experience.
