Paper short abstract:

How war changes our palate and creates a national idea of what is a national cuisine and other countries' cuisines? This paper explores the relationship between USA and Peru during the Peruvian internal war through memories of war food and the consumption of Meals Ready to Eat by military personnel.

Paper long abstract:

In the past decade, Peru has been experiencing a strong effort from the State to build a national discourse of what Peruvian food is and how it should taste, but what was Peruvian food before then? In the late 80's when the Peruvian State had already declared war on terrorist parties like Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement- MRTA, high-rank military personnel was receiving training by the US Armed Forces at the US Army School of the Americas being this the first time where some of them tried a Meal Ready to Eat (MRE). In this paper, I explore the impact that the US military food and food technology have had in this effort and how it has impacted the changes in the Peruvian palate and food production and consumption. This study is an ethnography of and object that uses the MRE's to explore the military and cultural impact of US in Peru's military ideology and the food production and consumption during wartime. I traced the influence of MRE's and wartime food through military memories and archival data of US food imports to Peru to understand why in a time were imported foods, were costly and hard to find the Peruvian State invested in imported food like the MRE's, and how these imports relate to what Peruvians recognize as American food.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will explore memories, emotions, and identities associated with different types of food among people in post-socialist Mongolia.

Paper long abstract:

Memorable food contains information that illuminates the past and gives rich information on people, places, and events. The major relationships between food and memory include memories of foods associated with identity and dietary changes as socially charged markers of epochal shifts (Holtzman, 2006: 364). Nostalgia is "an active insertion of memory in the construction of the present and future" (Hage, 2010: 417), and food is a culturally-constructed, multi-layered subject with social, psychological, and physiological dimensions (Holtzman, 2006: 362). The self-identified memories surely shed light on rapidly expanding ranges of food options in urban Mongolia, and perhaps indicate the diminishing influence of the Soviet period in terms of food choices among residents in urban Mongolia, as well as the increased stimuli of American food available in Ulaanbaatar. Urban residents have greater physical and financial access to ethnic cuisines and wide varieties of Western-style diets, including fast food and processed food, which were newly introduced or became popular in urban Mongolia in recent decades. In this paper, I will explore memories, emotions, and identities associated with different types of food among people in post-socialist Mongolia.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I focus on food memories in the context of sociopolitical changes in Poland after 1989. Stories about tastes are used for interpretation of the past and reflect contradictory sentiments, dependent on the generational experience and attitudes to the present.

Paper long abstract:

Individual narratives about the memory of tastes from the past are always located within a wider cultural material and mental space. Although they relate to idiosyncratic bodily sensations, they are shaped by socially shared semantic frames directing attention to what is culturally significant and defining both the experience itself and the memory of it. In this paper, I would like to focus on food memories in the context of sociopolitical changes that took place in Poland after the transformation in 1989. These narratives give insight not only into the specifics of sensual experience characteristic of the previous era, but also allow to observe how remembered tastes take part in formatting the memory of the past, and become a tool for its interpretation and assessment. My analysis shows that narratives about tastes of socialism reflect contradictory sentiments, largely dependent on the generational experience of remembering individuals and their attitude to the present. In the case of the older generations, it is typically a nostalgic memory, part of the discourse of loss and criticism of modern times. Narratives of the younger generations reveal an ambivalent valuation: they are either a mythical tale of happy childhood years used for autobiographical aims, or they underestimate former eating styles, by contrasting the monotonous and "unhealthy" flavours of the past with present diversity, sophistication and distinctiveness of tastes.

Paper short abstract:

Diverse ethnographic material from Chukotka, Russia demonstrates how the taste and olfaction are shaped and employed by the social institutions, from their position of power, to pursue expectations of pan-urban civility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore sovkhoizm through sensory aesthetic three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. It focuses on the taste and olfaction as a synergic realm. These two senses are viewed as both, the mental representations of the sensory stimuli (sensations produced by the nose and the tongue) and the metaphors of cultural values. For the paternalistic reality that employs gustatory and olfactory faculties, I will use the term panolfacton (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014:626, drawing on Michel Foucault's panopticon 1975); for the taste I use the term pangusticon. It can be described as the always permanent "Tongue" and "Nose" that exert cultural hegemony over aesthetic and social values and, thus, through sensory experience, assure the automatic consciousness of power. The codes such as delicious/ fragrant or, in contrast, disagreeable/stinky define different social spaces and affiliations; they change over time. Diverse ethnographic material from Chukotka, Siberia demonstrates how the social institutions, from their position of power, use the capacity of these two senses to pursue expectations of pan-urban civility. Here, especially vivid is the power divide in regard to indegeneity and the dichotomy local - incomer. The senses can help us reveal such social dynamics and put it in the context of the recent post-Soviet transformations.

Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the development of eating out and the street food landscape in Bucharest, the research seeks to explore how food trends play into the dynamics of social differentiation. More specifically, it concerns the foodie engagement with cheap, popular foods.

Paper long abstract:

By focusing on the development of eating out and the street food landscape in Bucharest, the research seeks to explore how food trends play into the dynamics of social differentiation. More specifically, it concerns the engagement with cheap, popular foods of an emerging category of urban foodies (Johnston and Baumann 2010).

At the centre of these emerging codifiers of foodie taste is a street food item called 'mici': traditionally a working-class food available particularly in open-air markets or bus terminals around Romania, consisting of freshly grilled, garlicky minced meat rolls. Other similarly 'trending' items are cheap cuts of meat or meat stews usually cooked and consumed as hearty, filling meals recalling Bourdieu's 'taste of necessity'. These items are either consumed in peripheral locations (as a form of adventurous gastronomic local tourism) or are recreated in middle-class, gourmet consumption contexts.

This recently acquired appetite can be viewed as a provocative redefinition of class taste. Through these instances of 'eating otherness' (Abbots 2017), foodies engage in forms of appropriation politics. This pursuit seeks to consolidate a foodie self around narratives and performances of inclusiveness, morality and personal authenticity, with a keen focus on the contexts of food production and consumption. Transgressive experiences, such as eating greasy, cheap meats in improvised, peripheral venues while immersing oneself in unfamiliar crowds are enhancing a foodie portfolio engaged in contemporary class politics.

The paper will discuss ethnographic and interview data centred around how the materiality of such food items is experienced sensorially.

Paper short abstract:

Ghanaian plates seem to be undergoing major changes. Western inspired meals and taste become a part of status games particularly among the emerging middle class. Traditional and new ways of eating are engaged in a dialectical conflict negotiating health, modernity and social status.

Paper long abstract:

Ghana, a former West African British colony, boasts what can be called a "typical West African cuisine". Yet despite widely acknowledged attachment to traditional foods, seen as part of local and ethnic identity, Ghanaian plates have been undergoing major transformations. In this paper I would like to present how growing availability and demand for Western food in Ghana are correlated with the emergence of new gustatory preferences and lifestyles, in particular among the aspiring Ghanaian middle class. Such factors as rapidly evolving labour market offering more formal employment, growing economy and close international ties between the country and western-based diaspora seem to contribute to the change of both everyday and celebratory eating patterns. Such changes are visible even in Wa, Upper West, the most remote and poverty-stricken region of Ghana. Tuo zaafi, traditional bland corn meal porridge is popularly being replaced with rice with tomato stew and egg which is not just quicker to make but has become a sign of modernity and progress, inasmuch as using Maggi cubes. Relative affluence becomes a signifier of being able to eat "tasty" food - one that provides intense gustatory experience. Furthermore, wedding and funeral meals are often no longer a family responsibility. Catering businesses are offering a simple monetary exchange for elaborate and modern-looking buffets. Everyday choice "what to eat" becomes a dialectical statement navigating modernity, health choices, ethnic identities and socio-economic status.

Paper short abstract:

The migration from a country to another includes different changes such as food, taste, the way of cooking and eating. In the case of children and their family in asylum-seeking situation, how do the changes in food taste affect their experience of migration, belonging, and integration?

Paper long abstract:

My doctoral research questions the role and place of food in the daily life of children and their family in asylum-seeking situation. Based on ongoing fieldwork at a Red Cross reception center and at an elementary school in the Province of Liège (Belgium), this paper aims to describe and analyze the food sensitive experiences of families and more particularly of children, through transformation or, on the contrary, the upholding of taste habits in a migratory context.

The - positive or negative - taste experience has a core place in the discourses on food in the field. Coming from various countries, socialized where references are quite different from those existing in the Belgian society, families in asylum-seeking situation (adults and children) often have difficulties adapting to the food provided at the reception center, which forms the basis of their daily diet, and which is organized according to the practices, values and norms in use in Belgium. In fact, the changes in taste, practices and eating habits, are sometimes substantial between the origin society and the host society.

In this context, the children diet crystallizes many issues, discrepancies and tensions around some topics such as the transmission of values and food experiences, the education of taste, and the changes of food practices. How can the transformative power of taste affect the belonging feeling and identities in the case of refugee children and their family? How can changes in taste influence the experience of migrants?

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I would like to present how the nahuas of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, identify their values and emotions through the taste of food and which moral and social rules they follow in order to accept to incorporate new food.

Paper long abstract:

Eating food means to incorporate its properties into the body, "building ourselves through food", as Fishler said. To do this, it is necessary to identify the food we eat, know what we eat, its origins and, above all, its taste, that is what makes the food we are going to be fed with, accepted.
Based on the material collected in my fieldwork among the Nahuas of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, I would like to show how their "principle of flavor" (Rozin and Rozin), chili, is present in their traditional diet and in modern food and how they can manipulate what they consider dangerous and bad tastes domesticating them intentionally through cooking in order to convert them into food good to eat. 
When introducing food into the body, we also embody the culinary system of the group to which we belong that apply a dietary rules that exclude or include food that need to be adapted to formal, social and moral requirements.
If the "eater" stands against the incorporation of a particular food, he is going through a manifestation of disgust that activates a cognitive operation that consists in verifying if the potential food meets the cultural categories and the culinary rules of reference. In this paper I would like to present how two nahua women experiment this phenomenon directly related to personal experiences and feelings of the idea of eating new food.

Paper short abstract:

Analysing the practices regarding menarche and menstruation in Kerala, India, within and across three generations, I argue that the sense of taste is a social construction and, therefore, reflects and reveals the existing cultural dogmas, symbolic orders and systems of stratification in the society.

Paper long abstract:

Based on the narratives of women across three generations, I try to show how menstruation, as a gustatory experience in contemporary Kerala is different from what it was in the past. In Kerala, the different values associated with taste, revealed, informed and instructed through menarche rites, worked as behavioural directives for women till the second half of the 20th century and also initiated women into a gender-determined sensory order. Besides, during the time of monthly menstruation, women were taught compulsory sensory restraint through gustatory restrictions. However, in present-day, urban Kerala, satisfying the gustatory cravings during menstruation and assuaging its distressing experience by frequently introducing gustatory stimuli, seem to be a major feature of menstrual practices among women. I argue that this change was brought about by the abandonment of menarche rites by different communities owing to the social Renaissance movement that gained momentum in Kerala by the second half of the 19th century as well by the advent of certain aspects of consumer culture, the pervasiveness of technological advancements, the introduction of a modern, medical discourse of menstruation. An analysis of everyday gustatory knowledge, experiences, and practices of women regarding menstruation demonstrates a clear break from how it was in the past and thereby asserts the fact that 'taste' is understood, acquired, experienced and even attached with meanings differently, at different points of time, even in the same society. This establishes the point that gustation is not achieved by the body alone, but also is a social construction.