RECIPES and RESEARCH in the CLASSROOM
Introduction
Edited by Ryan Kashanipour and Joshua Schlachet
A pedagogical provocation: Food is both over and under theorized. While academic interests in foodways have exploded in recent decades, the field of study has often rested on positivist and materialist accounts of food and consumption or on narrow epistemological interrogations of identity formation, historical tradition, conviviality, or familial inheritance. New entrants into the field of food history and culinary studies frequently assume that food and taste is a Euro-American affair. After all, the scholarly and popular literature are dominated by English-language works that narrate patterns of consumption and the rise of novel cuisines. At the University of Arizona, this past year we challenged an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students to interrogate our excessively audacious and problematic premise.
In a course called “Theorizing Food: Critical Approaches to the Global Study of Eating,” we invited students to consider the historiography of foodways and to advance novel approaches to understanding consumption, both past and present. As faculty in different units—Kashanipour in History and Schlachet in East Asian Studies—we co-taught this course through the interdisciplinary graduate program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. Several years ago, we proposed this experimental graduate course to consider the intersections of theory and practice of foodways. We intentionally aimed to rupture traditional academic disciplines and to encourage students to engage across the spectrum of humanistic and social scientific methods. Or, to put it more appropriate to the themes, students were asked to be intellectually omnivorous and to taste a variety of approaches and perspectives.
Our the pedagogical provocation about the over/undertheorization of food served as a springboard into new ways of framing and conceptualizing culinary cultures—one that our student contributors embraced. We began with more questions than answers. How might our students grapple with the limits of our field? How might they seek new approaches and implement existing ones differently? Yet one question stood above the rest as a scaffolding for all we explored: in its theoretical and methodological foundations, is the study of food and society, to invert the common idiom, a mile deep and an inch wide? Students devoured the concepts and created their own.
In this spirit of interdisciplinarity, the backgrounds of our participants truly ran the gamut, enriching our theoretical vocabulary with approaches spanning from history to anthropology to media studies; from education to English rhetoric to second language acquisition. Still, both of us are cultural historians—a disciplinary outlook that gravitates towards critical perspectives of friction, rupture, and change over continuity narratives of conviviality, inheritance, and tradition. Although we discouraged our transdisciplinary cohort from descending into the methodological fixations that occupy our point of view, we also urged them to seek out the tensions, the messiness, and the incongruity that complicate overly tidy narratives of culinary heritage—a challenge to which they unequivocally rose. We further encouraged them to globalize: to encounter the Eurocentrism of food scholarship and learn what they could while neither internalizing its geographical boundaries nor reproducing its modes in another place. While our context was rooted in Latin America and East Asia, again stemming from our own areas of expertise, our students proved themselves unafraid to zoom out and think with and through these underrepresented regions towards more inclusive theoretical perspectives on the study of food and eating.
The result was a sustained, fifteen-week conversation that culminated in a student-centered research symposium featuring the insightful, original lightning essays that we now present to you in this special edition of The Recipes Project. Since we charged our students with the task of reimagining the global study of eating through the lens of critical theory, the proposition of an over/undertheorized food studies has ruffled more than a few feathers, perhaps yours included. We see this as all the more reason to welcome you into the discussion, and we hope our provocation proves as generative to all of you as it did for all of us.
Featured in this Special Edition of the Recipes Project, our students offer their brilliant, innovative, and creative approaches to theorize and understand foodways. What, for instance, might a genetically modified banana have to say about the experience of trust in scientific knowledge, or a dreamy birthday cake circulating on Chinese social media about the nature of ephemerality and nostalgic imagination? What could culinary scrapbooking in nineteenth century Mexico tell us about the construction of familial sentimentality, or native corn crops about the construction of constitutional law? What about Taiwanese food films as conveyors of intergenerational trauma?
In the posts to follow, we are delighted to share the outcomes of our students’ journey into the theory of food with our RP community, as we invite you to join in the critical conversation that they have so creatively inaugurated.
Please note: When citing the articles in this issue, follow the OpenEdition guidelines, but use the author’s name provided below the title for attribution.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Kinship in the Kitchen: Reading Mexican Cookbook Manuscripts for Familial Sentimentality
By Amalia M. Sosa Haby
Cookbooks form important, though often overlooked, parts historical research. Despite cookbook manuscripts not always having clear marginalia, I posit that they offer an avenue for understanding Mexican familial sociability and relationships as they relate to activities around food – primarily, cooking. Perhaps, they are a starting point for offering insight into the more sentimental and interpersonal aspects of mother-daughter relationships, intergenerational knowledge production, childrearing, and even children’s (or young women’s) pastimes… [read more]
Food in Post-1980 Taiwanese Films: An Investigation into Diasporic Chinese Experiences, Patriarchal Po2wer Dynamics, and Folk Traditions
By Huafan Su
Food and food preparation in artistic creation are never merely self-referential demonstrations. As Mary Douglas observes, “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed” (Douglas 61). In film studies, food and culinary labor often serve as key elements in depicting interpersonal relationships in both private (familial) and public (social) spheres. This explains the prominent role that food plays in filmmakers’ observations of social transformation through the lens of everyday family life. This essay examines food and food preparation in five Taiwanese films produced after the Chinese Civil War: Kuei-mei, A Woman (1985), The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), The Red Persimmon (1997), and Zone Pro Site (2013)… [read more]
The Colours Capitalism Cannot See: Maize, Rights, and Colonial Logic in Colombia
By Katharine H. West
When Zenú farmers in San Andrés de Sotavento, Colombia, have given colourful names to their maize varieties. These includsangre toro (bull’s blood), cucaracho (striped like a cockroach), huevito (little egg), piedrita (little stone), panó, tacaloa, berrendo. These names encode generations of knowledge: culinary properties, ecological adaptations, ceremonial significance, relationships between seed and soil, between plants and people. Both the names and the crops they represent are irreplaceable… [read more]
Seedless Future: How Diminishing Scientific Trust Leaves Bananas to Rot
By Alexander Paulchell
With its mild flavor, creamy texture, and bright yellow peel, the banana almost seems designed for human consumption. Although dozens of banana varieties exist, the most traded is the Cavendish (fig. 1), with global production exceeding 50 million tons annually (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Native to Southeastern Asia (Reynolds, 1927), the banana’s global spread reflects a complex history of human intervention. Scientific manipulations, including selective breeding and clonal reproduction, have shaped the fruit consumers enjoy today while producing plants that are also highly vulnerable to disease. Bananas could be given genetically engineered immunity, but early evidence suggests consumers distrust genetically modified (GM) foods. Science education encourages trust but overwhelming, contradictory information creates a misalignment between science and individual thought… [read more]
Baking a Dreamcake: Dreamcore Archiving and the Politics of Dream Realization
By Miao Chen
You are now looking at a Dreamcore post on RedNote, a Chinese social media platform. With the photo of an old-fashioned cake shop in the 2000s in China, the post evokes nostalgia and brings the viewer back to their millennial childhood. Dreamcore is a post-pandemic social media genre in China. Circulated on social media, it invokes millennial themes that originally migrate from the American Y2K web culture. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many promises of globalization, people turn to Dreamcore for nostalgia… [read more]
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