Culture and Cuisine (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Vietnamese Dietary System: The Unfathomable Story of a National Culture in Foods View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tien Ly
This paper examines Vietnam veganism, a culinary culture which is original, diverse and popular in the country, yet is still unknown to the people across the world. The paper reveals the Vietnamese art of cooking vegan foods concentrating on the basic ingredients: vegetables, roots, fruit, soy products and mushrooms, which grow abundantly in Vietnam. These are prepared to be delicious, healthy and eye-catching dishes. Vietnamese veganism places a lot of emphasis on the balance of principles which are incorporated into dishes. The cooking process focuses on fragrance, taste and color, and is artistically associated with five flavor elements: spicy, sour, bitter, salty and sweet. These flavor elements match perfectly with Asian concepts of force: air, fire, water, earth, and space. Each vegan dish reflects a regional flavor, a spiritual beauty and a nutritious combination in harmony with the physical nature of the country. The Vietnamese know how to apply these factors for creating delicious and healthy food to serve the plant-based dishes with tasteful and colorful alternatives. The study of Vietnamese veganism discloses not only the Vietnamese dietary system but also its identity, particularity, philosophy, daily habits, and core values via its original and outstanding vegan dishes such as Phở chay, Bánh cuốn chay, Bún chả giò chay, Bánh ít trần, Đậu sốt cà chua, Bún bò Huế, Canh chua chay, etc.
Rooted in the Region: Agriculture and the Arts in Southwestern Ontario View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amanda White, Zoë Heyn Jones
This paper explores the titular curatorial project, which is a forthcoming day-long arts event scheduled for September 2022. “Rooted in the Region: Arts and Agriculture in Southwestern Ontario”, uses research-creation and artistic knowledge mobilization to look at local and regional agricultural practices and issues in relation to the globalized systems through the lens of the arts, highlighting Indigenous, settler, and Mexican voices. This event will combine food and artistic interventions; a panel discussion including scholars, farmers and artists; and a curated film screening of works that address agriculture, art and labour. Southwestern Ontario is one of Canada's richest farm belts. However, issues around food security and food justice persist. Ontario's agriculture industry draws tens of thousands of migrant workers every year to work on its farms and in its greenhouses, with an ever-increasing percentage coming from Mexico. Simultaneously, Indigenous farmers, gardeners, chefs, seed keepers and others maintain traditional knowledge, and innovate, despite ongoing colonialism and dispossession. The goal of the event is to bring together community members as participants and audience, as well as interdisciplinary researchers involved in art and food studies in southwestern Ontario to create impactful alliances and to plant the seeds for innovative future collaborations. Our presentation for Imagining the Edible: Food, Creativity and the Arts will reflect on the “Rooted in the Region” event in relation to our hypothesis that the arts can imagine—and therefore help to achieve—food security, food justice, and food sovereignty.
How to Eat in a Pandemic: The German Media Coverage of the Covid-19-Crisis and Food View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carolin Küppers
The COVID-19 pandemic has widely been discussed as a global crisis that impacts daily life worldwide, including food security, global supply chains, consumer behaviour and nutrition. As the pandemic proceeded in 2020 and 2021, already existing problems of the food system became part of the political agenda and gained public visibility. In Germany, this topic was broadly taken up by local and national newspapers and questions of global food supply chains, expected food shortages and international food security were raised, as well as questions on how the pandemic would and did change consumers food choices and eating habits. This paper analyses the media coverage of Corona and its impact on food and nutrition in German newspapers. Initially it gives a general overview which food related topics were addressed during the two lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently it analyses how the pandemic affected pre-existing intersectional inequalities and blind spots in food production and consumption.
Food Fights in Europe: Contentious Food Politics Over Time
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jennifer Rutledge
This paper examines contentious food politics in Europe to explore the changing nature of food riots/protests and their relationship to welfare and agricultural policy. While scholars have explored the dynamics by which food protests occur, less attention has been paid to the results of these protests. In particular this paper considers the changes over time in the nature of contentious food politics from the food riots of the 17th and 18th century to the farmer protests of today by using data from a new database on global agricultural protest events, which these authors have created. This paper argues that contentious food politics had and continues to have an important role to play in policy-making: first, by creating the normative expectation that the government would provide subsistence help, which laid the groundwork for the welfare state; and second, by forcing the EU to maintain a policy of agricultural exceptionalism, which has corresponding effects on the European welfare state. Thus, this paper challenges and deepens the conventional understanding of the origins of the welfare state and demands that scholars expand their conceptual understanding of the welfare state.
Food Insecurity and Other Basic Human Needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown in the Jinja District Suburbs, Uganda: Food Insecurity and Basic Human Needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pamela Mukaire, Ogbochi McKinney
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown the increased food insecurity and economic hardship across Uganda significantly impacted certain subgroups. With this study, we seek to gain a better understanding of the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on food security and other basic human needs. We conducted a household level survey using a convenience sample in Jinja district Uganda from April 2021 to December 2021.Local non-profits distributing food packages in 15 local communities conducted a survey of participating households. We used logistic regressions to generate adjusted odds ratios (AOR) and 95%CIs for food insecurity and select demographic characteristics. Among 5169 respondents, the majority (77.4%) reported experiencing food insecurity during the COVID-19 lock down. Respondents with job loss and lower incomes were more likely to experience food insecurity. We report multiple physical and economic challenges related to food access. Majority among the 5,169 survey respondents reported lacking house rent (68%), water (74%), electricity (78%), child tuition (68%) and medicine (82.5%). Food security was positively associated with the lack of water, electricity, medicine, tuition and perceived increase in family relationship strain. Our study indicated the high prevalence of food insecurity and highlights its associated factors among low income communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is instrumental in providing additional research findings that illustrate the continued need for interventions targeted towards vulnerable food insecure subgroups.
Nantucket Receipts Then and Now: Memory, Identity, and Sustainability in the Face of Environmental Crisis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara Evenson
The island of Nantucket, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts, has always been an enigma. It has always been curiously connected to, yet cut off from, the mainland and the rest of the world. Its earliest white settlers were Quakers seeking asylum in its remoteness, yet the island quickly became an important part of the globalized trade networks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following the collapse of industrial scale whaling, the island fell into disrepair until it became a desirable resort community in the mid-twentieth century. Despite all of this change, one thing at least has remained constant: the island has always been incapable of producing enough food to sustain its population. Despite this, Nantucketers developed fierce loyalty to items they deemed as regional foodstuffs. This can be traced from manuscript cookery books dating back as early as the 1830s. In this paper, I utilize Nantucket cookery books to discuss what islanders believed to be uniquely Nantucket fare in the nineteenth century and how nostalgia and colonial revival sentiments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries created local heritage cookbooks. Importantly, I then place that within the context of modern-day Nantucket which is facing an urgent environmental crisis that threatens not only their sustainability, but their island itself.
