Bread plays a crucial role in Egypt, profoundly impacting identity, family, and public interactions. Made from wheat, bread is not only a vital component of the national diet but also a focal point of Egypt’s social policy. Ensuring its affordability remains a central aim of the government. Despite these efforts, the availability and affordability of bread have continued to be points of debate and tension within Egyptian society. More than just a material good, bread in Egypt functions as a significant social indicator that affects and establishes relationships between people. It signals various states such as prosperity, distress, anxiety, and social and political mobilization. Bread is a remarkable commodity that provides nourishment while also serving as a potent symbol, encompassing spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions.
Throughout Egypt’s political history, bread has emerged as a potent symbol in political discourse. Bread-related protests and movements have often signaled dissatisfaction with food policies and government actions. Shortages or price fluctuations in bread have frequently triggered public outcry and served as catalysts for social and political change. The political history of bread in Egypt encapsulates themes of division and cruelty as much as generosity and fulfillment. This was starkly evident during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, when bread became a powerful symbol of protest. Women held up pieces of bread, and men made helmets from it, emphasizing the slogan, “Bread, Dignity, and Social Justice.” Though bread may appear mundane, it is far from trivial. It represents power structures, human agency, and patterns of social relations. Bread is a gift that satisfies hunger, provides pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. It acts as a link between the powerful and the powerless and between abundance and scarcity on family dining tables across Egypt. Bread’s presence at the core of daily life, the desperate measures families take to secure it, and its role in moments of crisis all underscore its significance.
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Bread as a Social Indicator in Egypt
Nefissa Naguib
Article
Class Mobility among US Farmworkers
Alex Korsunsky
Racial hierarchies have defined US agriculture from its beginnings, structuring access to land and imposing boundaries between farmers and farmworkers. Racialized exclusion from other economic opportunities and from the full protection of the law have been key factors curtailing farmworkers’ opportunities for upward mobility within agriculture. Despite these barriers, farmworkers have consistently attempted to move up the agricultural hierarchy and establish themselves as independent farmers.
In the wake of the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black workers sought to acquire land to farm. Some succeeded, but their ability to advance was severely limited, and many remained trapped in debt peonage or sharecropping arrangements. Despite widespread anti-Asian sentiment and legal prohibitions on land ownership in the late 19th and early 20th century, some Asian immigrant farmworkers in California and in other West Coast states established themselves as successful orchardists and truck farmers. As agribusiness came to increasingly rely on Mexican farm labor in the early 20th century (a trend that accelerated and expanded geographically from the Second World War onward), Mexican workers’ immigration status as Bracero guest workers or undocumented migrants often kept them mobile and legally barred from putting down roots.
As more Mexican farmworkers began to settle in the latter part of the 20th century, increasing numbers of them found ways to access farmland. Others achieved economic mobility by transitioning from seasonal to year-round jobs, occupying more specialized and responsible roles, becoming labor contractors, and establishing nonfarm businesses to supply growing immigrant communities. Studies of class mobility among Mexican immigrant farmers reveal not only the barriers they have faced, but also the resources that these farmers have used to seek advancement, including their experience in agriculture, access to labor, and capacity to self-exploit their own labor. The turn to agriculture is not purely a financial decision, but also reflects personal and cultural values and aspirations, and links some farmers into wider social movements organized around the concept of food justice.
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Colonial Era British Food and Spice
Amanda E. Herbert
Growth of the British colonial system also meant big changes to British diets and to the spice and flavor of British food. Britain’s actions in invading, colonizing, and settling the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds gave British people, both at home and abroad, access to new and more ingredients. In 1972, historian Alfred W. Crosby identified the early modern global exchange of animals, plants, and—crucially and tragically—diseases and pathogens, as the “Columbian Exchange,” a cataclysmic biological moment instigated by Christopher Columbus in which separate biomes came into sustained contact for the first time. Scholars have since expanded the scope of this study, with Judith Carney, Edda Fields-Black, and Jessica B. Harris, among many others, drawing critical attention the fact that the Columbian Exchange was a global phenomenon, and that while this was a moment of wonder and curiosity for some, it meant devastation for many others.
In this globalizing early modern world, the rapid and widespread movement of people, plants, and animals changed the ways that British Atlantic people flavored their food. Using ingredients from the Americas, cooks gained access to vanilla, chili and new kinds of palm oil. From the African continent, they learned of grains of paradise, peppermint, cottonseed oil, coffee, and sesame. And from Asia, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, and mace became staples in British Atlantic kitchens. Some of these spices and flavoring agents would have been familiar—cinnamon had been traded across the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia for hundreds of years—but others would have been novel. And all were much more widely available and were combined, altered, and adapted in fresh ways. For women and men in the British Atlantic world, this meant that foods like “pickled mango,” an entirely mango-free dish spiced with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chilis, had a spot at the table. It also meant that many different kinds of people, including Black women and men, indigenous communities, and white settler-colonizers, seasoned their foods in new ways. Made possible by access to global markets, facilitated by invasion and colonization, and undergirded by enslavement, British Atlantic foodways were both piquant and experimental.
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Edible Insects
Gina Louise Hunter
Insects have been an important part of the human diet from time immemorial. Although they are not a common food item in Western cultures, insects contribute to the traditional diets of many peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where they are valued for their sustenance, taste, and medicinal properties. Research on edible insects includes historical and archeological investigations, ethnographic descriptions of insect foods in indigenous cultures, and studies of insect food farming, commercialization, and acceptability. Like other animals, insects are a source of protein and fat macronutrients and many vitamin and mineral micronutrients. Given an increasing global demand for sustainable protein, insects are a potential food resource for the future. Agricultural development experts, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, suggest that farmed insects are environmentally sustainable because they offer high feed conversion efficiency, require less space, use less water, and need fewer chemical inputs than conventional livestock. Insects generally have a short life cycle, reproduce rapidly, and can subsist on a varied diet, sometimes including organic wastes and agricultural or industrial byproducts. Given that insects are not commonly eaten in Europe and Euro-America, much of the literature is written from the perspective of noninsect eaters on the potential and challenges of a novel or alternative food. Insect-based food items on the European, British, and American markets face regulatory challenges and lack of consumer acceptance.
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The Ethiopian and Yemeni Roots of Coffee
Michel Tuchscherer
The beginnings of the history of coffee can be found in two neighboring countries separated only by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Coffee’s history starts before its consumption in Europe during the middle of the 17th century and before the development of its cultivation in the European tropical colonies during the 18th century. Yet this history is not well known in the early 21st century and often is pervaded by myths, the best known being the myth concerning the goat-herder Kaldi. There are objective reasons for this situation. In Ethiopia, the origins of coffee are found solely in the southern part of the country. Written sources about coffee that predate the 18th century are extremely rare, and so far very few archaeological excavations have provided data about coffee consumption. In Yemen, the archives that could cast light on the relevant period, from the end of the 15th century to the start of the 19th century, are mainly in the hands of families who are scattered across the country. Because of early-21st-century conflicts in the region, access to these archives is completely out of the question.
Nevertheless, research published since the 1990s in the areas of history and anthropology, alongside genetic analyses of the species Coffea arabica, opens the way to a new view of the pioneering role of southern Ethiopia and Yemen in the dissemination of the coffee consumption, the domestication of the coffee plant, and the production of coffee beans since at least the 13th century and up to the 18th century.
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Fat Stigma in the United States
Amy Erdman Farrell
Fat stigma has deep roots in US and Western cultures, dating back centuries. Whatever leniency or even valorization given to a fat body for its sign of wealth or healthy fecundity was largely replaced by a colonial abhorrence of fatness linked to processes of racialization, white supremacy, and the legitimization of slavery. Fatness became a powerful signifier of an “uncivilized” body, one unfit for modern life. These ideas continue to resonate in the early 21st century, fueling a $90 billion diet industry, causing discrimination in every institution and organization, and creating untold harm in the lives of fat individuals and communities. Significantly, however, these ideas are not uniform. Not only are there varied perceptions of fatness (the idealization of a fat baby’s body, the enjoyment of fatty foods, the pleasure in the curves and flesh of a lover), there is also an organized and decades-old fat activist and fat studies movement that challenges fat stigma on every layer.
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Food and Nationalism in India
Benjamin Siegel
The imbrication of food and nationalism in India and South Asia was an implicit concern in early anthropological literature on primarily Hindu foodways. In time, this theme became more explicit in historiographic work on colonial encounters and culinary resistance and in political economy of domesticity. It was also increasingly overt in and the emergence of food and hunger as a locus for nationalist claim making. The Bengal famine, coming at the crux of the freedom struggle in India, helped move these claims to more central positions in postcolonial Indian politics. An emerging body of work has seen culinary identity as central to both diasporic politics and questions of marginalization in Indian political life.
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Food and Religious Rituals
Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus
Food rituals, whether articulated intentionally or performed unconsciously in our biologically necessary acts of eating, do nothing less than construct and maintain our fundamental relationships in the world, and define who or what we are in it. In that sense, one might say that all food rituals are religious, though that depends on very specific definitions of “ritual” and of “religion.” One should distinguish between rituals in the weak sense (habitual patterned behaviors performed unconsciously) vs. rituals in the strong sense (performed with explicit, conscious intention). However, all rituals are performances of myths, that is, the basic stories we live by, whether or not one practicing them makes their intentions explicit. Food rituals are religious in that they govern and express the fundamental relationships we have in the cosmos: who or what we eat; with whom we eat; and for whom we are “food.” Food rituals create and sustain worldviews, and so are all fundamentally religious or religion-like.
To distinguish between the way critical comparative scholars of religion use the terms “religion” and “religious” and their use in common parlance, it makes sense to underline that “religious food rituals” normally refers to food rituals in the strong sense. Thus, religious food rituals often involve specific words or scripts (eating and talking, eating and reading), as well as other nonverbal cues and modes of paying attention: music, costumes, special props, accentuated or exaggerated gestures, and designated authoritative officiants. For example, the Jewish Passover seder, Christian communion and Lenten fasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Muslim observance of halal rules and Ramadan fasting, Jain or Buddhist vegetarianism, and many forms of Hindu puja are rituals in the strong sense. Examples of food rituals in the weak sense are secular veganism; shopping for food in grocery stores; Weight Watcher dieting; or eating meals in a breakfast, lunch, and dinner sequence (Mary Douglas). These rituals imply certain assumptions about our relationships to animals and plants, capitalist consumer culture, ideals of beauty and well-being, and our identification with special social groups (e.g., family, national cultures, geographic regions). In other words, they too are enactments of the stories we live by.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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
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.
Article
Mezze and the Lebanese Table
Aïda Kanafani-Zahar
[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.]
The study of mezze in Lebanon is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in rural and urban contexts, in the mountains and along the littoral. It explored the foundations of this tradition and prompted the analysis of the Lebanese cuisine.
One of the most appreciated culinary traditions for the Lebanese people is to partake in a restaurant-prepared meal that includes an assortment of appetisers, grilled meats or the day’s special, and dessert. Mezze is generally understood as the diversity of hot and cold vegetable and meat dishes served along with the main dish. In a particular type of meal, the gourmet meal, however, mezze is the prelude to the main dish, generally consisting of grilled meats followed by fruits and sweets, the three courses articulating in a continuous and fluid movement. Enjoyed in renowned establishments to celebrate festive events or simply to share an agreeable moment with family and friends, the gourmet meal is destined to seek a particular emotion, kaif.
Mezze is composed of a large number of starters brought to the table in groups of dishes appearing one after the other in a precise order. Each group displays distinct ingredients, flavours, modes of cooking and temperatures. Guests indulge in the dishes as they come along. The wide range of starters shapes a specific time sequence and devises a pattern of eating, that of “tasting”, of “savouring”. The study of the sensorial complexity regarding its sequencing, scenography, and gustatory structure, reveals the representations of appetence in the culinary Lebanese culture. It provides insight into the visual requirements that a gourmet table must display and the flavour hierarchy aimed at kindling appetite and at preserving it throughout the meal. Further, it brings to awareness the categories of foods that necessitate the application of precise techniques to neutralise odours that cause inappetence. These elements offer the opportunity to examine the culinary sensibility expressed in the Lebanese culture. Notwithstanding the differences in organisation, time span, table manners, and purpose, the gourmet meal, in which mezze is embedded, possesses the same logic as the ordinary daily table: to stimulate and maintain the desire to eat. Both types of meals epitomise a sense-sustained culture of appetence designed at averting ill eating and sickness, a realm of research that merits investigation.
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