Taste Trends
Asynchronous Session
Commodity, Nature, and Taste: The Making of Taiwan’s High-mountain Tea View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hong Jiang
Based on field research in the Alishan mountain area in Taiwan, this paper explores cultural processes that shape the taste of Taiwan’s high-mountain Oolong tea. The tea enjoys a great commercial success, favored especially by those who are seeking the fresh nature taste of the high mountains. Small-holder tea makers cater to the customer preference to produce teas that are greener in color and lighter in the level of oxidization, yet this approach has narrowed the taste of teas and brought about some unwanted effects on the human body. At the same time, some tea makers go off the commercial grid to make white teas or heavily oxidized teas according to their own perception of the nature of the fresh tea leaves—they engage more intimately with the tea leaves, and their products have become a form of personal art and expression.This "personal" tea making effectively compliments commercial tea making by encouraging diversity of tastes and cultural empowerment. In discussing these two categories of tea making, I examine effects brought by discourses of nature, varied attention paid to the tea leaves as agents, and different roles of the senses (seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). In the conclusion, I highlight different roles played by the notion of nature in tea making, bring taste-making into a historical orbit of changing cultural processes, and anticipate future articulation of nature in tea making and tea consumption in Taiwan and beyond.
Envisioning a Racially and Economically Just Future Food System: Insights from the Experiences of Non-profit Organizations Responding to Food System Disruptions Caused by COVID-19 in the Chicago, IL, USA Metropolitan Region View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tania Schusler
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted food systems with detrimental impacts on food security and livelihoods. Due to structural inequities within U.S. society, the food system impacts of COVID-19, including food insecurity and risk of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace, were borne disproportionately by people of color. Among those responding to impacts in the Chicago, IL, USA region were non-profit organizations. Learning from their experiences can inform preparation to withstand future shocks, including from climate change. Through focus groups, we asked 26 representatives of 20 non-profit organizations that responded to pandemic-related impacts in the Chicago region food system to discuss their future visions for how food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed. We prioritized the perspectives of people of color. The majority of participants identified as Black/African-American or Hispanic/Latine and others as American Indian/Indigenous, Asian, or White. Through thematic analysis of the focus group discussions, we identified a collective representation of participants’ visions for the future food system with six tenets: (1) ensure healthy food for all regardless of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other social identities; (2) generate community wealth through local food-based economies; (3) value and protect farm and food industry workers; (4) connect people to food, land, and cultural traditions; (5) support reparations and healing for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities; and (6) promote equity across intersectional issues. This framework provides a tool for assessing whether food and agriculture technologies intended to address climate change challenges are likely to impede or advance social equity.
Featured Food Systems’ Sustainability through the Climate-Biodiversity-Health Framework: Case study - the Comox Valley, British Colombia, Canada View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mohaddese Ghadiri
Food systems are complex and multifaceted, comprising a diverse range of actors, processes, and interactions. The complexity of food systems necessitates the utilization of participatory system thinking as an effective approach to comprehending and developing sustainable and resilient food systems. However, the way the system maps can be visualized in participatory system thinking approaches is controversial. This practical research is a part of the Integrated Food Systems Planning Through Climate-Biodiversity-Health (CBH) Nexus project in the Comox Valley case. It pursues two main aims: to finalize the CBH system map of Comox Valley’s food systems, developed with a participatory approach, with the participation of stakeholders; and explain how participatory system thinking can be employed to clarify the complexity of food systems in a clear and concise manner for all stakeholders. The research is conducted by holding a series of workshops and using qualitative content analysis. The results of this study are used to finalize links and nodes of the system map and also propose developing a multi-dimension and multi-level app to show complex systems to share a clear, understandable, and reliable complex system map for all stakeholders. The findings demonstrate how different strategies align or conflict with various CBH imperatives, which can be utilized to support integrated community sustainability planning efforts, and additionally, the systems maps can be used as an analytical framework for further studies on how to address food systems (and broader sustainability) issues in a holistic way.
The Influence of Prestige and Dietetics in Medieval Recipes for Lamprey View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hannah Lloyd
In this paper I explore the role of lamprey in late medieval European elite dining. This fish was simultaneously highly prized as a costly delicacy, and highly feared as potentially deadly to consume, not unlike the fugu of today. Despite the many warnings from physicians denouncing the risks of lamprey, and the self-proclaimed obeisance of cooks to these same physicians, lamprey was immensely popular at the elite table. To understand how cooks negotiated the contradictory culinary and dietary aspects of lamprey, I contrast recipes for lamprey from an assortment of English, Italian, Catalan, and French collections with recipes for sturgeon, a fish of comparable status, and eel, a fish with similar health concerns. This study evaluates how the factors of prestige and health actually influenced medieval cuisine, and considers how dishes might also be shaped by that enigmatic third factor, taste. As this study demonstrates, the comparison of recipes for animals with shared and distinct traits can be a useful method by which to identify the underpinning logic and navigate the politics of a particular cuisine.
The Evolving Trajectory of a Cuisine: The Case of Marathi Food View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maithili Tagare
The publication of Soopashastra by Ramchandra Gupte in 1875 established the cookbook as a genre in Marathi writing. The cookbooks that followed, Gruhinimitra and Rasachandrika, were testimonies to the changing material conditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western India. This period witnessed the introduction of print technology, combined with access to education, both in the vernacular and in English, following the advent of British rule. These processes led to the development of distinct identities, like linguistic ones, among the middle classes. This paper delineates the processes that led to the development of a gastronomic identity among educated, upper-caste, middle-class ‘Maharashtrians’. Drawing on close readings and critical analysis of cookbooks from this period, the study aims to establish that the beginnings of ‘Marathi’ cuisine were fragmentary in nature. Although these cookbooks came to define and standardise ‘Marathi’ cuisine as a whole, this activity was largely undertaken by upper-caste men and women, who wrote from the vantage point of their community affiliation. Thus, instead of presenting an inclusive picture, Marathi cookbooks largely spoke of individual community cuisine and avoided blending inter-community recipes but gladly incorporated Western recipes. As such, Marathi cuisine did not uniformly represent the diverse social groups of the region and was coloured in hues of exclusive, Hindu, upper-caste tones. This trend continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, subjecting Marathi cuisine to a reductive expression of its diverse culinary cultures. Nearly 140 years after the first Marathi cookbook was published, Marathi cuisine still awaits inclusion.
