[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Since the first inscriptions of food-related elements in UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH) in 2010, the concept of food-as-heritage has grown and transformed, much like the field of food studies, to encompass an ever-expanding array of foodways, culinary products, and practices across the globe. Today’s social, digital, economic, and ecological realities have greatly transformed from the moment of these first inscriptions, which listed the “Gastronomic meal of the French,” the Mediterranean diet,” and “traditional Mexican cuisine.” Tracing its roots back to the 1989 “Recommendation in the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore,” and passing through the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, we can trace a shift from valorizing and giving visibility to cultural elements, with an eye on the Global South (departing from the dominant Western concept of built heritage, focused on churches or monuments) to an intention to preserve cultural practices through education and generational transmission. Food, however, according to Chérif Khaznadar (senior advisor for the French Cultural Commission to UNESCO) and other skeptics, was never intended to enter into this realm of internationally protected cultural recognition. Following inscription, critics worried about the inherent commercial component of foodways, the essentialization of practices, the impacts of tourism, and imbalances of power related to both representation and access to economic benefits. The state of UNESCO-inscribed ICH foodways today raises questions linking back to these initial concerns. This article will trace the emergence of food as part of UNESCO’s ICH program and outline key considerations and debates surrounding foodways and processes of heritagization. From discussing the concept of universal values and questioning top-down initiatives and power structures to exploring nation-branding, commodification, and links with culinary nationalism, this article presents the complexities of safeguarding food and of striking a balance between tradition and innovation. These discussion points will return to central questions relevant to the broader heritage field: By whom, for whom, and for what purposes is inscription sought?
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Article
Food and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Program
Jenny L. Herman and Raúl Matta
Article
Food as a Weapon
Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen
The use of food as a weapon is as old as written records. Siege, blockade, and starvation are well-documented military strategies, as are political strategies that use food as a tool to attract supporters and dissuade opposition. In the 20th and 21st centuries, societies attempted to limit the use of food deprivation as a tool of war. In this time period, international groups also increased humanitarian efforts to monitor and redress the nutritional harms connected to violent conflict. International human rights principles, as supporting architecture, assert that adequate food is a basic individual right for all human beings and that freedom from hunger is an achievable, measurable, and sustainable development goal. Because of the long-term history of weaponizing food, recent institutional efforts are in place to identify, measure, prevent, and redress harms. These include legal frameworks; economic, food, and development politics; nongovernmental, civil-society mobilizations; and community organizing around peace, food, and nutrition.
Because the destructive impacts on human health, environment, economic livelihoods, and societies endure for decades to come, the concept of “food as a weapon” can be broadened to “food wars,” which encompass connections between food insecurity and conflict in both directions.
Article
Food in Anglophone Children’s Literature
Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard
Food is an important touchstone for both children’s literature authors and scholars, as it functions as a key material object and cultural construct within an aesthetic context in texts written for children. A full understanding of the significance of food and children’s literature draws from the interdisciplinary field of food studies, with its bases in anthropology, sociology, history, and literary studies. Food studies provides an approach to show how pervasive food is in children’s literature and how it operates as a complex cultural, political, and aesthetic signifier in myriad ways. The major approaches and uses of food in texts aimed at children divide into eight groups: eating or being eaten; the empowerment and agency of the individual; socialization, manners, and rebellion within family and community; taste; food preparation; food production, famines, and feasts; place and culture; and identity.
While food is fundamental to all human life, it occupies a particularly important place for the young. Children require food to fuel their survival and growth; adults use it daily as a socialization tool to teach children manners and social values, so that, in essence, they become civilized beings within the context of their culture. Such socialization creates emotional responses within children: They learn to develop individual tastes which they must balance with familial and cultural group identity, in the process of which they may experience anxiety or comfort. Thus, food consumption is foundational to a child’s developing sense of self. Children’s and young adult literature explores the growing identities of its protagonists; thus, the pervasiveness and complexity of food representations within it is equally unsurprising. The ways that food is used by writers of children’s literature within their texts mirror real world cultural manifestations of food in children’s lives, both past and present, locally and globally. Ultimately, children’s literature is a microcosm of how food functions generally as a multivalent cultural signifier. Its presence and treatment within texts reveal existential anxieties; individuation through developing skills, abilities, and tastes; socialization into group mores and manners as well as resistance to them; and connections between individual experiences and location: all factors that go into shaping the identity of individuals, families, and communities.
Article
Food in the Medieval Islamic World (9th–15th Centuries)
Daniel Newman
The medieval Islamic world boasts a rich tapestry of culinary traditions reflecting the diverse cultures that make up the region. This period saw the introduction of significant changes in dietary practices, food culture, and foodways.
As the Islamic Empire expanded, it became a trading hub, introducing spices and culinary practices from across the known world. During the Abbasid caliphate, culinary literature emerged, showcasing a sophisticated cuisine that is arguably the richest of the Middle Ages. Surviving works originated in an area spanning from Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) to the Near East (Mashriq) and reveal the importance attached to the culinary arts and gastronomy in elite circles. The cuisine was inextricably linked with medicine, with an emphasis on the health benefits of ingredients and dishes.
Culinary texts also reveal the sophisticated kitchen equipment and tableware available and the attention paid to presentation. There was a structured approach to dining that started with appetizers and progressed to more substantial dishes, often involving complex flavors and cooking techniques. Religious teachings also influenced dietary practices, with prohibitions on certain foods and an emphasis on moderation.
The culinary treatises provide insights into the interconnection of food, culture, and religion in the medieval Islamic world, showing how culinary practices were influenced by trade, geography, and religious teachings, whereas the emphasis on gustatory sensation, health, and etiquette reflects the rich cultural heritage and the significant role food played in the social and religious fabric of medieval Islamic societies.
Article
Food Politics and Policy
Marion Nestle
The food industry is a vast conglomeration of national and international companies that produce, process, manufacture, sell, and serve foods, beverages, and dietary supplements. Together, these companies generate close to $2 trillion in annual sales in the United States alone. To protect sales and profits, food companies use strategies that firmly link politics to food and food systems—everything that happens to a food from production to consumption and waste. Food politics refers to how governments of groups, cities, and countries make decisions affecting food systems and how they balance stakeholder pressures in making those decisions. Food policies are the means through which governments implement political decisions through food laws, regulations, administrative actions, and programs. Politics and policies are instruments of power over food production and consumption and over who profits or benefits from them. This power, however, is distributed unequally and inequitably, with large corporations—Big Food, Big Agriculture—holding far more power than individuals or groups acting in the public interest. Hence, politics.
Article
Gastrodiplomacy
Johanna Mendelson Forman
Gastrodiplomacy is a subset of public diplomacy that uses food as a means of persuading audiences about the power of cuisine to promote specific foreign policy goals. The term entered the popular vocabulary in 2002, after an article in The Economist described Global Thai, a program launched by the government of Thailand to promote its cuisine abroad by providing financial incentives for Thai nationals to open restaurants in foreign countries. Like public diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy seeks to change foreign perceptions of a country and assumes a country’s image or brand can be managed to gain favor with foreign publics.
A subset of activities arising from gastrodiplomacy is social gastronomy, which uses food to achieve social change. Social gastronomy is citizen driven, linking entrepreneurship, food justice, and gastronomy. It started as a chef-led response to hunger and social inequality but has expanded to refer to projects that use entrepreneurship and culinary training as a means of social activism. Social gastronomy is a dynamic field, demonstrating the changing role that food plays in supporting a broad range of societal needs such as income inequality, refugee and immigrant needs, climate change, and humanitarian crises.
As an increasingly influential form of public diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy demonstrates the “soft” power of the plate to address some of the enduring challenges people face, from climate change to conflict to global migration.
Article
Genocide and Food in Postcolonial Narratives
Jonathan Bishop Highfield
Two of the five acts defined as genocide by the United Nations’ Genocide Convention of 1948 are causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The material erasure of foods, foodways, and food systems under colonialism and the representational erasure of those same foodways and food systems from the historical record serve as genocidal elements designed to destroy the culture of colonized populations.
Article
Grocery Stores and Supermarkets
Craig Upright
The modern grocery store is an institution that could not have existed in earlier time periods. Its creation required the development of reliable distribution systems, preservation technologies, and cultural changes related to the purchase and consumption of food products. The constellation of contemporary grocery store operations is incredibly varied: while dominated by large multinational organizations that often seek vertical integration, grocery stores in the Global North also rely on many types of smaller actors more intimately tied to the communities they serve. The distribution of grocery store outlets often reflects the systems of stratification that exist in all communities across the globe.
Article
Heirloom Seeds and Traditional Foodways
William Woys Weaver
The heirloom seed movement and its association with traditional foodways is a worldwide grassroots phenomenon motivated by a rejection of globalization and state-sponsored industrial agriculture. The goal of the movement is to create an alternative food safety net based on sustainable agricultural practices with emphasis on local and regional culinary identities. There are hundreds of grassroots organizations throughout the world devoted to seed saving and to traditional foodways. Since kitchen and market gardens are maintained in many societies by women, the heirloom seed movement is also imbued with agendas designed to promote the social status of women.
Article
The History and Roots of Tea
Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger, and Richard Coulton
Tea’s modern ubiquity as an international drink belies its origin as a plant—typically one of two varieties of Camellia sinensis—grown, harvested, and prepared for consumption in various Southeast Asian countries for millennia. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, historians with interests across the fields of trade, botany, and cultural studies have become increasingly interested in this remarkable transition and the perspectives it affords on global histories of labor, imperialism, mechanization, consumption, production, and transculturation (to name but a few). Tea’s foodways are both ancient, associated with cultural practices and origin stories found across the countries in which it flourished as an indigenous species, and profoundly modern. It is the ultimate convenience product, mass-produced and packaged in the form of cheap tea bags and bottles of the soft drink known as “ice tea.” Indeed, as a product of international trade since the early 16th century, tea has shown an astonishing ability to transform and redefine itself.
European travelers to China and Japan first encountered tea in the mid-16th century, and it was probably first imported into Europe in small quantities at around this time by Portuguese traders active in the area around Macau (澳門). In Great Britain, where drinking tea became recognized as a domesticated component of national behavior by the early 19th century, tea was first advertised for sale in the late 1650s. Across the 18th century, it increasingly became the focal point of the lucrative “East India” trade (as Europeans conceived maritime commerce with the Indian Ocean world), and its taxation as an article of consumption encouraged the formation of violent smuggling networks. During the same period, the establishment of a semi-regular overland trading network between China and Russia enabled tea to reach the eastern extremities of Europe via a caravan trade that was to persist until the mid-19th century. In the colonies of North America, tea became in the 1780s a focal point of the movement for independence, culminating in a series of protests remembered in national mythology as “the Boston Tea Party.” The rapid growth of the transoceanic trade in the 19th century, together with British imperial ambitions in India and beyond, led to the establishment of tea monocultures in India, Sri Lanka, and, in Africa, Malawi and Kenya, further extended in the colonial infrastructure of other European nations. The emergence of these tea plantations leveraged both the development of intensive practices of cultivation and mechanization (which were to shape global tea-production in the 20th century), and the consolidation of ownership and production by multinational corporations which continue to dominate the tea trade into the 21st century.
Article
The History of Cookbooks
Henry Notaker
The history of cookbooks describes the development of an old literary genre with an explosive growth from the last part of the twentieth century. Cookbooks are primarily collections of culinary recipes, written instructions often based on earlier oral communication. The cookbooks are handwritten, printed, or digitized in various forms on the internet. Most interest has been given to printed cookbooks, first published in Italy, France, and Germany in the fifteenth century and later spread globally. These books may build on local traditions, but many of them are translations from foreign languages, adapting advanced technology to local cuisine. The cookbook belongs to the handbook genre within nonfiction literature and has certain characteristics in composition, structure, literary style, format, typeface, design, and illustrations, features interesting for the student of book history, bibliographical science, and literature. The authors of the earliest printed books were men, many of them the printers or booksellers who published the books, but women took gradually over in northern Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century and in southern Europe only in the twentieth century. Most cookbooks include recipes for all sorts of culinary products, but there are also special books on one particular foodstuff, one particular type of dish, and special diets such as vegetarian, vegan, paleolithic, kosher, and halal. Cookbooks are important sources for the development of culinary traditions but also for any historical study. Apart from the practical instructions, cookbooks contain statements and references to social status, health, local produce, manners and customs, religion, taste, and aesthetics.
Article
History of Food Advertising
Sarah Elvins
Food advertising offers an intriguing window into the cooking and eating habits of a society, is shaped by the culture in which it is produced, and plays a role in creating and reinforcing attitudes about food. Food advertisements reflect and refract larger societal changes in gender roles, racial attitudes, kitchen technology, and more. American food manufacturers in the late 19th century were pioneers in strategies to connect with the public, using advertising to create a new, direct relationship with buyers. This was most prevalent with regard to processed and packaged foods. Ads encouraged consumers to look for specific brand names and to purchase items which might have been made within the home previously. Food manufacturers used a variety of means to encourage and shape consumer practices. Messages emphasizing convenience or modernity were often key to persuading the public to try new products. The strategies developed by American food advertisers were influential around the globe; in some cases, US food products expanded to foreign markets, and in others, local manufacturers employed similar approaches to food advertising.
Advertisers in the early 20 century targeted White, middle-class women as the “ideal” consumer. Gender stereotypes about food have often been mobilized by advertisers, creating a vision of family life where a woman’s primary role was to select appropriate foods to serve to her family. In times of change or crisis, advertisers played on anxiety and a longing for stability to encourage people to buy. Company mascots helped to make brands appear friendly and familiar but have also reinforced racist stereotypes about people of color. Critics have blamed food advertisers for changes in eating, which have caused health problems, and for manipulating consumers, particularly children. Although food companies pay millions of dollars for advertising budgets, there is no guarantee that all food ads will be effective. Consumers retain some agency in resisting or reacting to advertisements.
Article
History of the American School Lunch Program
Shayne Figueroa
School lunch programs in the United States reflect over one hundred years of public debate and policy involving nutrition, welfare, and agriculture. These programs originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely driven by philanthropic organizations and municipal efforts aimed at mitigating child hunger and improving educational outcomes among urban poor populations. The transformation from a decentralized patchwork of programs to a cohesive federal initiative began in earnest with the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946, signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. This pivotal legislation was a response to widespread concerns about child nutrition exacerbated by the Great Depression and World War II, fears regarding the fitness of American youth for military service, and the desire to continue agricultural commodity support for American farmers. It established the National School Lunch Program as a federally funded program that supported both agricultural interests and public health mandates, administered at the state level. As the program grew and evolved over the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, it became one of the largest and most debated social welfare programs in the United States. Updates to the legislation, including the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, further underscored the federal commitment to nutritional standards in school meals, as well as the intensely divided public debates around government involvement in family food choices.
Article
Home Economics, Domesticity, and Housework
Megan J. Elias
Home economics is an interdisciplinary combination of fields including laboratory and social sciences to study the phenomena of home life and thereby improve people’s everyday lives. It emerged in the late 19th century in the United States as an academic field of study, primarily at Land Grant universities. Demographics of the field, for both faculty and students, have remained predominantly female since its beginnings. Subfields of Home Economics, some of which have developed into independent fields of study, are nutrition, dietetics, food science, textile science, child psychology, and institutional management. The federal government in the United States supported home economics teaching and research through both the Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture. In colleges and universities, the field is now primarily known as family and consumer sciences, reflecting changes in the methodologies and philosophy of the field over the course of the 20th century. A central issue in the field has been how to empower individuals to navigate the consumer economy in their own best interest.
Article
Identity, Ideology, and the Language of Food
Cynthia Gordon and Alla Tovares
Linguistic and discourse analytic studies of food-related communication demonstrate how people construct identities and (re)create and contest ideologies that focus on food but extend well beyond it to issues of socioeconomic class, culture, gender, and privilege. Scholarship in this area considers how people engage in food-related communication across contexts, including in mealtime conversations, on restaurant menus and food packaging, in recipes, on social media, and as represented on infotainment food television. Analyzing the details of human interaction and texts also illuminates the role of specific linguistic and other communicative strategies—such as use of adjectives and metaphors—in constituting the food-related discourse that helps constitute human experience.
Article
Indian Ocean Trade
Jeremy A. Simmons
The Indian Ocean, with its annual monsoons, has served as an arena for human movement and the conveyance of foodstuffs for millennia. Climatological factors give rise to numerous distinct hydroclimates, ranging from the Nile River Valley to the Yemeni highlands and the vast watershed of the Himalayas. These environments supported domestication, cultivation, and redistribution of multiple staples, including wheat and rice. Spices, alongside aromatics, natural fibers, and organic dyes, were among the most popular items of trade: for example, black peppercorns, cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and cassia. Littoral populations throughout the Indian Ocean world (often derided as ichthyophages, or “fish eaters”) relied upon local fisheries for their own sustenance and commodities of trade—not only the daily catch of fishermen but also corals and pearls collected by divers and foragers.
The early modern period heralded a distinct change. For one, foodways radically changed with the introduction of plant species from the Americas and the formation of a wider “Indo-Atlantic” world. Although acquisition of spices motivated Europeans to establish colonial footholds throughout the Afro-Asian world, increased interest in and (forced) cultivation of stimulants emerged to sustain the changing tastes of consumers (e.g., sugar, coffee, and tea). Despite the economic and ecological transformations brought on by modernity, the Indian Ocean remains a region of intense activity, its many cuisines preserving a shared, interconnected past.
Article
Indigenous Foodways among Native Americans
Christina Gish Hill
Native peoples of North America have developed foodways over centuries of living in relationships with particular landscapes. These foods have emerged from detailed knowledge of the landscape gained through careful observation over the generations. This knowledge includes maintaining a sustainable relationship with the environment to ensure consistent food sources in some unforgiving landscapes. The advent of contact with European settlers in North America and the eventual insertion of Native peoples into a global capitalist economy dramatically affected Indigenous people’s relationship with the environment, impacting access to food using precontact mechanisms. Colonization of Indigenous peoples throughout North America altered their access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods in many ways, leading to severely degraded health in Native communities. Beginning in the early 21st century, Indigenous people throughout North America began to reclaim and rejuvenate precontact foodways in a quest to repair physical and emotional well-being, connect more deeply with ceremony, reanimate local economies, heal damaged environments, and ultimately work toward food sovereignty.
Article
The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil
Wilder Robles
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) is presently one of the largest, best organized, and most influential social movements in Latin America. The MST is one of the key founders of the Via Campesina, or Peasant Way, a global peasant movement dedicated to the struggle for agrarian reform. The MST is well known for linking both political and economic activism to contest authoritarian power structures in the Brazilian countryside. Agrarian reform is one of the most important objectives in this process. Since its formation in 1984, the MST has maintained the view that agrarian reform is fundamental to reversing Brazil’s long history of systemic marginalization of peasants and Indigenous people. Colonialism left a sad historical legacy of extreme concentration of land in the hands of a privileged few, and this situation has not changed. Brazil’s agrarian structure is controlled by a small minority that continue to promote a large-scale export-oriented agricultural economy. Currently, Brazil is the fourth largest agricultural economy in the world, exporting a high volume of diverse agricultural products such as soybean, beef, sugarcane, citrus fruit, and poultry to global markets. Yet, the intensive expansion of this export-oriented agricultural economy has caused immense human suffering and environmental destruction. These challenges have prompted the MST to propose a new vision of agrarian reform that integrates political and economic activism. Without comprehensive agrarian reform, Brazil will continue to be an inequitable society.
Article
Latinx Immigrant Workers’ Challenges and Collective Responses in the Rural US Food System
Diego Thompson
A large body of literature has shown immigrant workers in the US food system experience and deal with significant problems that are often worsened in rural areas. The state and the private sector have created conditions that rely on cheap immigrant labor in the food industry. Paradoxically, this same much-needed labor force is subjected to strict immigration policy and enforcement—including raids, detentions, and deportations—and poor and living conditions. Immigration control and struggles experienced by immigrant workers in different sectors of the food chain, are more pronounced in rural areas where immigrants often lack of supportive resources. The struggles of historically marginalized groups in the food system and rural communities in the US are well-documented but more attention is needed on how rural immigrant workers deal with their challenges. Furthermore, more research is needed to examine immigrant workers’ collective actions and the development of alliances. Studies have shown that collective agency does not necessarily need to come from traditional labor organizing or unions which may face barriers in working with immigrants in rural contexts. There are some experiences in the poultry and dairy industry, showing that worker-driven organizations with focus on immigration, human rights, and/or social justice issues, have been able to create solutions for immigrant workers’ needs and challenges in US rural contexts. Some of these cases have shown how Latinx immigrant workers have been able to develop and foster resilience in times of uncertainty and challenges, working with immigrant organizations and allies. Experiences from different regions of the US have shown that there are complex and vulnerable realities that immigrants in rural areas often experience which require special attention and need to be addressed before unfair or precarious labor conditions are challenged. It is important for scholars and community practitioners to pay more attention to how immigrant workers and communities can develop resilience and the capability to adapt and create better conditions in times of increasing anti-immigration political rhetoric and uncertainty.
Article
Living Fermented Foods and Drinks
James Read
Fermentation is the process by which microbes transform ingredients into a palatable product or ferment. Its customary uses are food preservation (as in sauerkraut) and alcohol production (as in wine or beer), though it is also highly regarded for flavor enhancement and health benefits. Research into fermentation is multidisciplinary, covering fields ranging from history and anthropology to microbiology and nutrition.
Fermentation has been intentionally employed as a preparation technique through which microbes and humans have domesticated each other for at least 13,000 years, across cultures spanning from Japan (miso) to Mexico (tepache). It is central to many foods and drinks, but when referring to “ferments” in a culinary context, most people do not mean bread, beer, or olives but, rather, the likes of kimchi, kombucha, and kefir. These could broadly be termed as “living ferments,” as they have at least the potential to contain live and active microbes when they arrive on our plate. This quality of vitality is not only merely useful for classification but also for indication of how they are made (such that there is no inherent pasteurization or dehydration to create the final product).
To categorize ferments further, they can be grouped as vegetables (such as kimchi, sauerkraut, pao cai, and gundruk), no/low-alcohol drinks (such as tepache, tejuino, atole agrio, kombucha, and juniper beer), dairy (such as yogurt, kefir, dahi, amasi, and tätmjölk), and soybeans (miso, soy sauce, douchi, koji, doubanjiang, gochujang, tempeh, natto, and meju).
Ferments can be made either by inoculation with a starter culture or by spontaneous (or wild) fermentation. In either case, competition and collaboration within the microbial community results in different species occupying their own niches, some of which are crafted for them through fermentation techniques and some of which the microbes develop for themselves. This adaptation is mirrored on a coevolutionary scale, as humans and microbes have made homes for and of each other.
