Untitled - Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

FOOD CULTURES
PRACTICES OF SHARING AND EXCLUSION
Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca – Laboratorio Expo
Scientific referee: prof. U. Fabietti
Introduction
According to cultural anthropology, nutrition is one of the principal dimensions through which mankind
communicates collective attitudes and forms of social organisation. We can assume that nutrition is a ‘total
social fact’ (Mauss, 1965), a cultural expression linked to the economic, political and symbolic levels of
society. Starting from its biological properties to the socio-historical factors, nutrition can be considered as
a holistic ‘object’, material and spiritual at the same time and whose complexity is difficult to reduce to
specific areas of study.
As a science of humankind and cultures, anthropology has also explored cultural diversity through the
different ways societies eat (styles, thoughts and practices), showing how the universal necessity of
nourishment turns into a contextual practice, shaped by specific human practices: codes, values and
nutritional patterns. Thus, in contrast to the animal kingdom, human beings are able to ‘culturalise’ their
own food resources. Food is transformed from nature into culture by means of knowledge and beliefs (food
manipulation, ways of sharing resources and cooking, forms of production/consumption, meal organisation
and incorporation rules (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; 1971). This process allows humans to transform a resource
into something ‘familiar’ or, in other words, edible. In light of this, every food culture has the same ‘dignity’
as any other, because it pertains to specific environmental and social assets.
Nutrition is a system of communication, which brings together meanings, forms of mentality and
identitarian attributes: from village organisations (in Africa or elsewhere) to contemporary societies, from
advertising to rituals. In the same way as language, food represents an independent system governed by
social rules which may appear to be ‘innate’, but, on the contrary, are acquired through a process of social
transmission and learning.
It can be said that there is no less knowledge involved in the construction of an agricultural tool in a
village than in the execution of a recipe. Similarly, no less important and complex are the relationships
surrounding these ‘objects’, the styles and techniques of execution, who does them, the relationship
between gestures and the time-space in which they are carried out, the link between raw materials and
symbolical concepts (for example, prescriptions and access rules) (Douglas, 1966; Tambiah 1969). These
aspects, discussed here purely for exemplification, allow anthropologists to explore micro-fields of
meanings, practices and conceptions. For instance, a common substance such as sugar was once a symbol of
prestige, consumed by the upper classes, and is now a widespread consumable. This transformation
demonstrates how a food stuff can assume diverse historical functions in the dietary paradigm; in this case
engendered by commercial trends and economic changes.
Owing to its complexity, it is difficult to summarise the multiplicity of the anthropological points of views
on food. This is mainly due to the fact that food is intrinsically an inanimate substance that only becomes
relevant when it starts to have a social and contextual sense; that is to say, when it activates relationships,
transactions, exchanges, reciprocity and alliances (Malinowski, 1922; Mauss, 1965; Sahlins, 1972;
Rappaport, 1968). In all of these cases, economic, political and symbolic aspects always co-exist. Thus, food
becomes a mirror reflecting social organisation and power and in a certain sense, the relationships that pass
through it.
A branch of food studies have concentrated on aspects of material culture. This approaches focus on
extreme situations such as famine, or in contexts of self-subsistence where food production and
consumption govern the integration of individuals in the social group (family, community etc.). However,
this kind of social assets has decreased in so called ‘complex societies’ as agrarian societies have
disintegrated from the middle of the last century and with the advent of the market economy. In this
context, particular attention is given to ecological relationships, environment, empirical knowledge, access
to resources and technologies.
On an immaterial level, dealing with communication and the organisation of meanings, specific attention is
paid to protocols, rhetoric and organisational rules that govern the organisation of food incorporation
(gastronomy, heritage and community, identitarian representations and forms of distinction). These aspects
are particularly important in contemporary Western societies, or in hybrid contexts (between “traditional
systems” and market economies) where food systems are fragmented into optional trajectories, which not
only take into account collective needs, but also personal choices expressed through new forms of
‘temporary’ belonging such as networks and lifestyles.
The French semiologist Roland Barthes (1961), stated that food is changing from a substance to a
circumstance, and gave coffee as an example: once considered an analeptic beverage, it has become associated
with rest and relaxation. From this viewpoint, it is possible to understand the extensiveness of the
anthropological approach, ranging from a ‘substance’, which is ascribed temporary nutritive and ideological
values (healthy/unhealthy, pure/impure, edible/inedible, clean/dirty) to a relational element, which fulfils
functions relating to experience and emotionality.
Food practices bear collective representations and trace the boundaries for cultural otherness. In its different
forms, contexts and functions, food can signal commonalities or antagonisms, homogeneity or hierarchies,
intimacy or distance (Geertz,1960, Appadurai,1981). From the anthropological point of view, food not only
expresses social relations but also contributes to construct and to give shape to them. Its practices of
production, transaction and consumption are intended as gastro-politics (Appadurai, 1981) that define
hierarchies of belongings and dynamics of social inclusion/exclusions. The actual massive flow of people,
commodities and imaginaries at the global level, has made the relationship with food an even more crucial
element for the individual and collective experience of contemporaneity. Within the global ethnoscapes
(Appadurai, 2001) the food carries the warmth and intimacy of familiar relations, exemplifies the
transmission of culinary knowledges that have been incorporated by individual skills and brings back to the
sensorial education that has become, since childhood, a specific way of interacting with the outside world.
Especially in migratory contexts, what one eats as well as the practices of conviviality become important in
order to sustain the sense of belongings in relation to an imagined community (Anderson 1991). The
complex network of interconnections and dependencies at the global level defined by Geertz as “capitalism
without borders”, has created the paradoxical effects of fragmentation and segmentation of social identities,
often represented in terms of culinary ethnicisation. From the anthropological point of view, the growing
interest for the “authenticity” (also in the culinary domain) can be considered a collective answer to a
shared feeling of dismay in the face of the anonymous Capital invasion (Augè 1982). In fact, the
commodification of food and the globalisation of its practices of production, circulation and consumption
(Goody, 1982) have not only meant its standardization, syncretism or cultural delocalisation. Rather, the
reinvention of tipicity’s markers that make food a product-symbol of a local culture can also be considered
an answer to the globalization of food consumption’s practices. The reconstruction of a traditional culinary
culture as an exclusive, immutable and ancestral tie between a community and a territory has emerged
when the people’s sense of belonging to a single place became problematic. The reinvention of food
cultures as autonomous and isolated systems not communicating with each other, has also served the
political end of reasserting unspoiled and original identities (Fabietti, 2000). For this reason, the
anthropological view on food in the contemporary world has covered a much wider and complex discourse
about collective imaginary and memory, self representation and relation to the “culinary other”. The three
paths of research that we propose as anthropological reflections on food practices make evident the
multisided and continuously changing characters of food as complex cultural phenomena. Food cultures are
seen in relation to the social construction of taste and the process of food aestheticization, to the making of
individual and collective identities and the sense of belonging, and to the actual process of food
heritarigization.
Bibliografia
Appadurai A. (1981), Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia, in American Ethnologist, 8, pp. 494–511.
Appadurai A. (2001), Modernità in polvere, Roma, Meltemi (ed. orig. 1996).
Augé, M. Simbolo, Funzione, Storia, Liguori, Napoli 1982
Barthes R. (1961), Pour une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation, Annales ESC, XVI.
Bourdieu P. (1983) La distinzione. Critica sociale del gusto, Bologna, il Mulino (ed. orig. 1979).
De Garine I. (1994; 2002) The Diet and Nutrition of Human Populations, Companion Encyclopedia of
Anthropology (Ingold T. eds), London, Routledge, pp. 226-264.
Douglas, M. (2003), Purezza e pericolo, Bologna, il Mulino (ed. orig. 1996).
Fabietti U., Malighetti R., Matera V (2000) , Dal Tribale al Globale, Introduzione all'antropologia, Milano,
Mondadori.
Firth R. (1934) The sociological study of native diet, Africa, 7(4):401-414.
Geertz C. (1999), Mondo globale, mondi locali, Bologna, il Mulino (ed. orig. 1995).
Goody J. (1982), Cooking, cuisine and class. A study in comparative sociology, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
Harris M. (1992), Buono da mangiare, Torino, Einaudi (ed. orig. 1985).
Haudricourt, L’homme et les plantes cultivées, Paris, Metaillé, 1987.
Ingold T., (2004) Ecologia della cultura (a cura di C. Grasseni, f. Ronzon), Roma, Meltemi.
Leroi-Gourhan A., (1964), Le geste et la parole, Paris, Michel.
Lévi-Strauss C. (1971), Le origini delle buone maniere a tavola, Milano, Il Saggiatore.
Lévi-Strauss C. (1966), Il crudo e il cotto, Milano, Il Saggiatore.
Malinowski B., Argonauti del pacifico occidentale, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1973 (ed. orig. 1922).
Mead M (1964) Food Habits Research: Problems of the 1960th, Publication 1225, National Academy of
Science, National Research Council, Washington DC.
Maurizio A. (1932) Histoire de l’alimentation végétale depuis la préhistoire jusqu’à nos jours, Payot, Paris.Mauss
M. (1965), Saggio sul dono. Forma e motivo dello scambio nelle società arcaiche (ed. orig.1923-24), in: Teoria
generale della magia e altri saggi, Torino, Einaudi, pp. 153-292.
Mintz S. (1985) Sweetness and Power, New York: Viking Penguin.
Rappaport R.(1968) Pigs for the Ancestors, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Richards A. (1932) Hunger and work in a savage tribe: a functional study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu,
London, Routledge.
Sahlins M. (1972), Stone Age Economics, Aldine, Chicago.
Tambiah S. J. (1969) Animals are good to think and to prohibit, Ethnology, VIII; 4, pp. 424-59
1. Food aesthetics and culture of the senses
Scientific referee: Prof. Ivan Bargna
Referee :
Prof. David Le Breton, Université de Strasbourg
Prof. David Sutton. Southern Illinois University
The gustative, olfactory, tactile, visual, kinesthetic sensations that characterize our food experience are not
individual and private experience. Instead they define our relationship with food as it takes place in the
social practice of food consumption, transformation, supply and production. Indeed economical (Harris
1985) material as well as symbolic (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1968; Douglas 1970,1985; Tambiah 1969) factors
interact with each other in order to define the sensorial processes.
Indeed, the food taste and disgust become social constructions through the cultural elaboration of the
sensorial experience. (Elias 1969; Macbeth 1991; Anderson 2005). By mean of them, identities and
belongings are defined; their transmission from one generation to the other brings to the awareness of
who we are and the memory of what we have been. (Sutton 2001; Holtzman 2006).
Taste and disgust trace borders and frontiers, state exclusions, define belongings and then allow to
discriminate, to distinguish, and to rank people in a social group in terms of good and bad taste (Bourdieu
1979). They mark the difference between cooking and gastronomy (Goody 1982). Indeed the issue of taste
is also a political one, with evident economical implications. (Bayart 1989, Appadurai 1981).
The boundaries that define the inside and the outside of a social group are not fixed, and are not
indiscriminately the same for everybody. Instead they are normative models that establish codes of
behavior, only partially shared and put into practice. What we eat is linked to specific situations, to the
availability and potential access to recourses, to the ongoing struggles, to fashion, to the individual or
collective choices and needs (Mintz 1985; Sutton 2010). The taste, the food preferences and aversions, are
characterized by changes, sometimes slow or fast, fleeting or lasting, that are the effects both of the
evolutionary history of the species and of the last publicity campaign. Today, due to the establishment of
the agri-food industry on a global scale, there is the spreading of standardized products that bring to a sort
of taste simplification and a planning of sensorial experience for economical ends. This is realized through
multisensory marketing strategies and the preparation of ready food with high level of sweetener, fat and
salt. It is a phenomenon experienced in the South as in the North, in the rich countries as well as in the
poorer ones and that is particularly significant in the economically and culturally disadvantaged
social strata. At the same time takes hold the sometimes elitist research for culturally rooted testes, often
lost in the past and that have to be recovered or re-invented by means of disciplinary or certifications.
Their values of authenticity and genuineness have to do also with culture, linking food, collective memory
and territory.
All these processes of taste and consumes reconfiguration have to be thought inside the wider
aestheticization process of daily life that covers all the spheres of social life, from politics to the moral and
economical arena (Featherstone 1990; Rifkin 1995; Lipovetsky, Serroy 2013). The aesthetic dimension, as
the sensible and emotional part of the experience, is a connective element in every society but in the
contemporary world gets even more relevance, since the whole social structure is imbued with it. In the
transition from a society centered on the working time, savings and renunciations, to one that emphasizes
consumes, spare time and amusements, beauty and sensorial gratification become objects of mass
consumption. The process of aestheticization becomes evident in the connections between food, arts, design
and fashion. Especially in the arts the relation with food, even if it is not a new phenomenon, appears
increasingly more relevant. From one side the food-art connection becomes a sort of cultural commodity
that boost the touristic economy (for example the combination of expositions with wine and agri- tourism),
and from the other side it blurs the line between culinary art and the art made by artists. Not only much of
artistic works actually consists of cooking and modeling food but also well-known cooks, in the role of
artists, are invited to take part of the Biennale. The arts rely on daily life as many creative professions rely
on arts. This artistic and aesthetic dimension of dealing with food underpins professions like that of food
designer that plan “food architectures” or the organizers of commercial spaces (from supermarkets to
restaurants) that have to set up multisensory context enabling consumes. Increasingly, the differentiation
among similar food products takes place through their aesthetic reworking, the packaging, the publicity,
and the intangible markers of the brand or the graphic one of the logo. The food appearance, the visual
dimension of food experience, becomes the most relevant aspects for the consumes patterns especially when
the injunction for eating comes with the equally powerful one of fasting in order “to stay in shape”. When
we speak about taste we should keep in mind that it has not to do with an exclusive enjoyment only for
people that can afford it, but a crucial anthropological issue. At the same time we should be aware that the
majority of world population, because of their difficulties to get access to food and to achieve food safety,
has little chance to have culturally meaningful gustative experiences.
In spite of the globalization of the agri-food industry and the resulting impoverishment of food cultures
and the taste homologation, the local perception of communitarian belongings, social hierarchies and
distinctions, are still linked to people, to the mobility of groups, to crops, food and corporeal practices. The
cultural dimension of cooking and of food practices cannot be split from the making of trans-ethnic and
trans-national tastes, from relations of exchange, domination and predation and from the re-appropriation
of food items and dishes outside the area of their origins. .
Indeed it appears clear how the taste issue is also a political one that has to be understood in terms of
rights, equity and social justice. Since the multisided gustative experience has to be intended as cultural
production, so its homologation and deprivation can be seen as forms of de-culturalisation and cultural
dependence that affects people’s everyday life. For example the “typical” European and African food and
cooking are rooted in the coming of new food plants from the Americas.
The opposition between the globalised taste of food industry and that of the regional ways of cooking, can
be partly mitigated. , In fact the regional cuisines are increasingly becoming exportation goods and
destinations for an international culinary tourism. On the other side also the serial products have to be
readjusted on local tastes, as it happens in the small ethnic restaurants all over the world.
In many cases the relationship between the local and the global has to take into account several other levels
like the aspiration for a “national cuisines” that often become a tool , not without the risk of culinary
chauvinisms, for the political construction of a nation, (Appadurai 1988; Belasco, Scranton 2002).
2.In wealthy societies, where economic crisis is paradoxically going to disseminate the phantom of food
insecurity, the patterns of consumption are becoming more and more omnivores, while tastes are
increasingly opening to curiosity: on the supermarkets’ shelves any kind of goods appears immediately
available, at least as an object of desire.
Be them dealing with hedonism or healthiness, food choices are moved mostly by individual motivations
and tastes. Sensory food experiences tend to be reduced to the act of consumption: daily cooking time is
decreasing (replaced by snacks, fast foods and restaurants services) while a vision of cooking is turning into
leisure, as a strongly aesthetized and mediatized experience.
The consumption, notwithstanding the fact that it has been individualized, remains nonetheless a social act,
a conclusive moment of a decisional chain about what and how to produce and to distribute, decisions that
frequently concern environment, life and death of people and animals, aspects often hidden and
unperceived. From this point of view, the impoverishment of tastes is not only due to a simplification of
flavors, but also to the loss of symbolic dimension, to the inability of creating meaningful and enduring
relationships, whether “around the table” as much as by the retailers and the producers as well. Therefore,
this impoverishment is not perceived by society, as it is well dissimulated by the illusion of the increasing
opportunities to taste foods once unachievable, being ‘their social life’ (not the traceability of origins, but
rather the social relationships built around the production and the distribution processes) nevertheless
unknown to the consumers.
If the only choosing criteria becomes the free individual pleasure (influenced in fact by advertising and
marketing), taste becomes de-socialized and backed out of any kind of sense of responsibility.
In an opposite direction seem to go the reflexive or critic patterns of consumptions, which move from
concerns of social justice and individual needs of simplicity and sophisticated frugality. In this
heterogeneous world, which gathers different situations, such as spontaneous associations (like GAS,
Solidarity Purchase Group), Onlus (like Slow Food) or leading food businesses (like Eataly), matters of
taste play a crucial role in combining ethic or esthetic attitudes, according to the statement: “The paradox
of pleasure is right in the rigor that needs to impose in order to reach it” (Petrini, 2001). Frugality turns
into distinction, altruism is practiced through consumption experience and social engagement becomes
‘cool’.
3.The experience of food (like the sexual one that is tied with food in terms of pleasure and renouncement)
goes more and more through the mediation of images: those of advertising, television cooking shows, food
packaging or specifically created settings to sell and consume food. The image seduces and leads to the
consumption, even sublimating it, creating therefore the satisfaction of the desire without accomplishing
concretely the act itself of eating. Thus, such television programs where showmen and guests keep eating
up to exploding or either they perform ingurgitating disgusting stuffs, take spectators to an extreme
experience, avoiding the self-destruction and respecting the duplicity and contradictory esthetic imperative
of enjoying and keeping slim.
If some of these programs provide recipes or dietetic prescriptions, some others, in the form of reality,
enact agonistic and competitive relationships around food, which appear as a parodist version of the real
global struggles for the achievement of food resources. This plethora of cooking shows may hide the
difficulty in representing the lack of food, they translate the image of hunger without falling into an
embarrassing of dramatization of misery.
QUESTIONS
If it’s true that the taste dimension is one of the domains throughout which culture is produced in complex
and diversified patterns, the homologation and privation processes linked to tasting experience to which
food dynamics are subjected to, act as de-culturation and dependence patterns affecting the quality of life of
people.
Thus, the taste issues could be re-formulated in terms of cultural rights, the individual and collective right
of getting healthy and satisfying food, good to eat and to think as well. Therefore, is it possible to address
some policy recommendations to the bottom-up policy-makers body, economical and social ones, fulfilling
commitments in the different domain of food production, distribution and consumption, policy
recommendations that allow, in a non-prescriptive way, to strengthen the connection between taste and
culture; or to contribute to the contemporary in a creative way, going beyond the simple acceptance of the
current anomy or the nostalgic degustation lure?
Bibliografia
Anderson E. N., 2005, Everyone eats. Understanding foods and culture, New York Univerity Press, London
New York
Appadurai A. 1981, Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia, American Ethnologist, 8, (3)
Appadurai, A., 1988, How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 30,1
Bayart F., L’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Fayard, Paris
Belasco W., Scranton P., 2002, Food Nations. Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, Routledge, New York
Boltanski Luc, 1993, La souffrance à distance, Métaillé (Lo spettacolo del dolore. Morale umanitaria, media e
politica, Cortina, Milano, 2000)
Bourdieu P., 1979, La distinction, Minuit, Paris (La distinzione. Critica sociale del gusto, Il Mulino, Bologna,
1983)
Douglas M.,1970, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth (Purezza e pericolo. Un’analisi dei concetti di contaminazione e tabù, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1975)
Douglas M., 1985, Antropologia e simbolismo. Religione, cibo e denaro nella vita sociale, Il Mulino, Bologna
(Implicit Meanings. Essays in Anthropology, Routledge & Kegan, London, 1975; In the Active Voice, Routledge
& Kegan, London, 1982)
Elias N., 1969, Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den Weltlichen Oberschichten des Abenlandes, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt, La civiltà delle buone maniere, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1982)
Featherstone M., 1990, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London, Sage Publ. (Cultura del consumo e
postmodernismo, Roma, SEAM, 1994)
Goody J., 1982, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: a Study in Comparative Sociology, University of Cambridge Press,
Cambridge
Goody Jack, 1998, Food and Love. A Cultural History of East and West, Verso, London (Cbo e amore. Storia
culturale dell’Oriente e dell’Occidente, Cortina, Milano, 2012)
Harris M., 1985 Good to Eat. Riddles of Food and Culture, Simon and Schuster, New York (Buono da
Mangiare. Enigmi del gusto e consuetudini alimentari, Einaudi, Torino, 1990)
Holtzman J. D., 2006, Food and Memory, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35
Howes D., 1991, The Variety of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London
Howe D., 2003, Sensual Relations. Engaging the Senses in Culture & Social Theory, The University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Lévi-Strauss C., Le cru et le cuit, Plon, Paris, 1964 (Il crudo e il cotto, Mondadori, Milano, 1966)
Lévi-Strauss C., 1968, Les origines des manières de table, Plon, Paris (L’origine delle buone maniere a tavola, Il
Saggiatore, Milano, 1971)
Lipovetsky G., Serroy J., 2013, L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’age du capitalisme artiste, Gallimard, Paris
Mintz, S. W. 1985, Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin Books, New York
Pertini C., 2011, Buono, pulito e giusto. Principi di una nuova gastronomia, Einaudi, Torino
Rifkin, J., 1995, The End of the Work. The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market
Era, New York, Putnam (La fine del lavoro.Il declino della forza lavoro globale e l'avvento dell'era del postmercato, Milano, Baldini & Castoldi, 1995)
Sutton D., 2001, Remembrance of Repasts: an Anthropology of Food and Memory, Berg, Oxford
Sutton D., 2010, Food and the Senses” Annual Review of Anthropology, 39
Tambiah S., 1969, Animals are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit, Ethnology, 8 (4)
2. Food and belonging: territories, bodies and cultures
Scientific referees: Prof. Silvia Barberani and Prof. Mauro Van Aken (Università degli Studi di MilanoBicocca)
Referees:
Food scarcity and famines: Prof. Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Centro di ricerca Lasdel, Niamey (Niger)
Food and agri/cultures: Prof. Ananilli Vasavi, National Institute of Social Sience, Bangalore
Food and Social Exchange: Prof. Adriano Favole, Università di Torino.
Food and Alimentary Rhetorics: Prof.ssa Flavia Cuturi (Università di Napoli L’Orientale); Prof. Guido
Nicolosi (Università di Catania)
Food and Alimentary Practices: Prof. Marino Niola (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli); Prof.
Vito Teti (Università della Calabria).
Food and its intimate interrelationship with body and with interconnected cultural and social practices,
have a privileged position in defining individual and collective belonging and the meanings of an historical
era.
Eating is not merely a biological factor. What is edible it is not simply what is biological edible, but it is the
result of cultural choices, of semanting transformation, which select some natural elements transforming
them into food. By translating parts of the environment into food, as Appadurai has shown (1981), natural
elements engender a powerful dispositive of meaning, where individual and social dimensions are highly
interrelated. Indeed, food is a highly condensed “social fact” that evokes memories, imaginaries and
meanings reproduced in the transmission of patterns of knowledge; this implies and reifies technological
assets, relations of production and of exchange, conditions of the territories and of the economy, realities of
abundance and scarcity of food.
Understanding the dynamics of belonging of food in contemporary world is thus related, first of all, to the
awareness of the actual disjuncture between food -and who consumes it-, the territories where it is
produced and its cultural systems, as patterns of knowledge, social relations and work systems in the
environment.
In the frame of this epochal disconnection that involves both North as much as the South of the world, two
main perspectives challenge the analysis of the symbolic and belonging meanings of food: the first
perspective is focused on the emergent and innovative patterns of production, distribution and
consumption, which confer to food its symbolical and relational meanings, as much as its political and
cultural dynamics. Secondly, food patterns of consumption are studied as tools of identity construction at
the individual level (diet regimes, consumption of organic or industrial food) and at the collective level
(alternative patterns of consumption), which are related to the dimension of incorporation of eating that
ties intimately the food and the body.
These two main perspectives, complementary and interconnected, share the understanding of food as
cultural construct, a fundamental base in individual and collective patterns of belonging, a medium of
complex social and economic relationships, of power, of ideas of nature and of the contemporary
contradictions of the relationship of society and environment.

Reconnetcing food, territories and cultures
Following large-scale industrialization of agriculture and agro-business, food cultures have radically
changed in southern and northern countries: a disjuncture has imposed more and more between the
farmers or those who produce food, the consumers and their territories, and the cultures and
‘agri/cultures’. New modes of production in producing and thinking food have inevitably modified the ideas
of locality and of local autonomy, the notions of nature and of the environment.
Not only at the local level in Lombardia region, but even more at the European and global scale,
agriculture is undergoing a strong agrarian crisis of unsustainable development models, strong social fears
connected to food crisis or of food manipulations and diseases, increasing risks of hydro-geological crisis
and rural land abandonment, even more in hilly or mountain areas. Furthermore, the consumption of soil in
peri-urban contexts are extending, while intensive are the rural transformations in connection to the global
dynamics of agro-food industry. The management of common resources, as land and water, shows the
strong contradictions of intensive modernization paradigms and reveals at the same time, its political
character at centre of the public debate and social movements.
Facing the widespread political and social attention connected to sustainable models of development, to
food security and sovereignty, the analysis of rural context are often restrained by a reductionist
perspective, unable to understand the complexity, the heterogeneity and the dynamics that are today at
stake in agricultural and pastoral areas. It is therefore crucial an analysis of the development models that
are at stake today and a special attention to the relationship between societies and environments,
condensed in ideas and practices in producing and consuming food. An image of a “virtual agriculture” has
often taken place (van der Ploeg, Renting, 2000, 2001) within modernization theories based on urban and
western perspectives of food intensive production, a stereotype of “farmers” distant for the multiplicity of
roles played by farming cultures in contemporary reality, which hinders a comprehension of the innovation
patterns present at the local level in rural environments.
As anthropology of development has taught in decades (Arce, Marsden 1993; Olivier De Sardan, 1993;
Long 1992, Grillo 1990, Hobart 1993), rural contexts are political arenas and “battlefields” between
different ideas of community, of territory and their relationships, between different projects activated
within modernization programs, multiple social strategies where the economic dimensions of food are
embedded in the social and cultural reality and not seen as a mere technical and economic sector.
1.Agricultural patterns are interconnected to cultures and ‘agri/cultures’: system of values, of belonging, of
local experts systems and knowledge patterns linked to local patterns of “savoir faire” and incorporated
knowledge, all elements which are at the base of the production of “diversity” (cultural, economic and
ecologic). In rural contexts, patterns of knowledge in farming and producing food are not always
coincident with oral or written patterns of knowledge reproduction and transmission, since they constitute
an ‘art de la localitè’ (Van der Ploeg, 1993) and practices of locality (Ingold, 2004), knowledge patterns
deeply linked to their territories and landscapes, to historical relationships to their environments and to
economic and, at the same time, moral and aesthetic patterns in relating to farming.
Ethnographic perspective, which focuses attention to daily social and cultural patterns, allows revealing
the social dynamics, the local resource management patterns and cultural strategies in facing the intensive
changes in food production and in environmental relationships. This means facing actual changes following
models of co-production of societies and environments (Arce 1993, Escobar 1996, Renting 2001), instead of
the nature/cultural dichotomic models that characterized modernist perspectives in scientific models: the
analysis of food has to start form the mutual interdependence and reciprocal transformation between
societies and environments in their local specificities. This allows to focus on the ecological limits and on
the relationships in farming, an element often valorised by other cultures, and to take seriously local
practices and knowledge system in food making, which are often connected to ethical and moral notions of
the work of the land.
Food patterns in local cultural contexts are the results of different social and economic patterns in
producing food and relating to the environment: local knowledge, consuetudinary rights, patterns of
cooperation and ideas of autonomy which cannot be detached from the values of food, in food policies and in
the understanding of local changes and global contemporary crisis. The diversity of these food cultures are
connected often the reproduction of biodiversity and of landscape diversities: models of development have
to interrelate more and more with these local systems that have been left aside for decades, not as an
heritage to idealize but as an active actor of dialogue in order to avoid the increasing dynamics of
exclusions and inequalities in food production and in the access to food.
2. Understanding the meanings of food –and of its scarcity, unequal access and of famines- in contemporary
world relates to the deep disjuncture between food (and who consumes it), the territories where it has been
produced (more and more distant and unknown) and the cultural systems (as patterns of knowledge, of
work, symbolic and political relationships of agricultures). Food is often isolated from its land and
resources, and from the work pattern that produce its diversity, sustainability and multiplicity of cultures
and environments.
Reconnecting these three dimensions in planning and local participation is the premises for policies, which
can be closer to the needs of involved population. Sustaining emergent and alternative networks of food
production, distribution and consumption (as Gruppi di Acquisto Soldiale and Des in Italy, Amap in
France, seeds banks, rural networks of food security) and the new ideas of food as social and political critic
are today a challenge for a truly participation for a sustainable change.
Food is connected to its scarcity, its unequal access in quantity and quality and to food crisis, where strong
stereotypes are mediated between us/them, north/south of the world, that avoid reading the social and
economic dynamics as they are perceived by the local populations: the coping strategies, the relationship
between food crisis and structural economic problems (as agro-pastoral realities), migrations, patterns of
malnutrition, dynamics of poverty, as some examples), and the encounter with aid machine in food
distribution, which often works following strong cultural misunderstanding or introducing new political
realities in the distribution of resources.
If outsourcing of production in the globalization of food is one of the main strategy in agribusiness,
amplifying and hiding the food chain among territories, within a process of ‘refashioning food’ as a main
engineering endeavour (Goodman, 1999), rural realities are often pictured as the anchor of authenticity, of
local identities, of “nature” of food: notwithstanding this gap, conventional agro-business is engendering
social anxiety and fears in relation to the quality of food, of the sustainability of modes of production in
intensive pattern, connected to environmental degradation, land-grab, consume or agricultural
abandonment and rural exodus. In fact, society has “freed” itself from the environment, agricultural
production has amplified the process of de-territorialization and of the production of rural “non-lieux”,
which are at stake in local contractions in rural areas.
Access to food is more and more a question of access to land and water, to the autonomy in seeds
reproduction, to the sustainability, social and environmental, of the models of production at the local level:
access to food cannot avoid taking into account inequality of status, of gender, and environmental and
economic segmentation: multiple actors in the south and north of the world make pressure, as a political
and cultural process, for a truly recognition of these problematics within food policies and food production.
Milan and Lombardia region display a diffused mobilisation of local actors that are reconnecting society,
agriculture and food consumption at the territorial base through local networks, engendering trust and
transparency in the chain of making food and searching for a pattern of co-production in making food.
These patterns of innovation are often linked, in Italy and even more in southern countries, to the search of
social cohesion, of ecosystem synergy, of critical attention and change of urban-rural relationships through
food. Models of change are already “on the fields” and these local experiences and challenges, economic and
cultural at the same time, display important contemporary questions linked to food, but reconnect at the
same time new patterns the diversity of food, its environment and producers directly to the “table”.

Food, body and identity
In contrast with “traditional” societies where a collective order – a gastronomy – is created through the
ingestion of food, nowadays the coercive bond of alimentary practices seems attenuated.
Individuals are progressively less aware of the origins of their aliments, their modes and times of
production and the importance of power relations that lie behind food and food-related practices. Food has
become an opaque object, less invested with symbolic and identitary connotations: the industrialization and
the distribution of aliments are perceived as detached from the act of consumption, and aliments themselves
are progressively separated from nature; as a result the consumer is kept away from his/her bio-cultural
universe.
Food is a mere commodity and individuals are reduced to mere consumers.
Such process is similar to the current individualization of the body, that separates the individual from
society as a whole (Le Breton 1990). At the same time – however - it is revealing of a diffused sentiment of
regret, a nostalgia for a time of perfect reciprocity in the relation between men and food, once mediated
only by near social relations and intergenerational knowledge, much similar to the idea of “structural
nostalgia” elaborated by Michael Herzfeld (1997: 109) with reference to the political arena. As a result, a
growing number of individuals have become aware of the overdetermined nature of their alimentary
choices, have voiced critical concerns towards the assimilation of aliments void of identitary character, and
have embraced a new-found interest in the idea of food as a means to assert identity.
Sociologist Guido Nicolosi (2007) has elaborated on the notion of orthorexia to metaphorically define a
prominent feature contemporary society, one that is characterized by a high degree of reflexivity at the
level of alimentary practices. Such hyper-reflexivity is presented in its various meanings: dietary (fitness),
ethical (critical consumption), aesthetic (food design), symbolic (slow food), psycho-pathological
(alimentary disorders), and translates into a modern gastro-anomy (Fischler 1992), the superabundance of
food and contradictory food-related discursive practices and the simultaneous lack of social criteria and
social control over alimentary practices and dispositions.
In that loss of collective references, food has been the subject of numerous shifts in meaning over the
course of the years, and has undergone a process of progressive individualization: it has gone from being a
private practice and custom, an act of care, responsibility and the symbol of female virtue in the domestic
sphere, to being recognized as a public phenomenon, an index of personal care, of recreational activity, of
creative endeavour at all levels (private, public, virtual), the starting point new forms of sociality based on
common interests, values and tastes (for instance the proliferation of organizations that promote
sustainable food consumption, community-supported agriculture (CSA), cooking classes, alimentary-related
blogs etc.). Food has become pervasive, and flexible. Its “magic” quality, its ability to vehiculate well-being
or illness, to aggregate, to create social distinctions (Bourdieu 1979), to influence social behaviour and
consumption make it a good example of “total prestation” (Mauss: 2002).
1. In contemporary society, the centrality of the body and the pervasiveness of food are well visible in the
act of incorporation, which is fundamental in the construction of individual identity: food, a liminal
substance that cross-cuts the boundaries of nature and culture, inside and outside, Self and Other, forces
the individual to manage anxieties related to potential – real or symbolic – poisoning (Fischler 1992) and to
commit to choices that are often durably and indelibly marked on the body.
There is a close bond between body and food (Lupton 1996) and both notions have undergone significant
historical, social and cultural changes in recent years.
Socio-anthropological scholarship has documented the shift from a conception of the body as “open” typical
of pre-modern societies, where the single individual and the body were assimilated to society through
rituals, to a performative conception of the body as inherently “closed”, typical of modern societies, where
the individual asserts control over his/her own corporeal boundaries and chooses what to assimilate. In
contemporary society, the body is not the natural site where culture is inscribed, but the material basis to
forge, exhibit and revoke plural identities (Le Breton 1990). It is a project, a task, a result and a challenge;
it is a responsibility: in this sense, for instance, being in bad shape, or being ill are indicative of scarce selfcontrol and represent a form of failure in the personal management of one's body.
The emphasis on individual responsibility and the dichotomous distinction between good or bad aliments,
healthy or unhealthy food, just or unjust alimentary habits – a categorization that pertains individual
behaviour and global responsibilities (environmental and biodiversity protection) – distinguishes food
consumption from other forms of consumptions. Furthermore, and most importantly, it underlies the moral
connotation assigned to food-related practices and to consumer: a “bad” aliment is harmful to one's health;
its ingestion is sign of moral weakness and scarce self-discipline; vice versa, “good” aliments are healthy
and the sign of moral strength and self-discipline. If such taxonomies insist on self-discipline, alimentary
rhetorics that promote alternative forms of food consumption insist on personal responsibility; in either
case, “good food” is also “just” (Petrini 2011).
2. To find out the identitary meaning of food means also to think about food as a cultural product, a vehicle
of individual and collective identities. Food is conceived in relational terms, ecological, social and
commercial. Organic-related food practices and modes of consumption – a inherently heterogeneous
category that includes a variety of aliments, modes of production, distribution and consumption and
various social actors more or less actively involved in the search for valid alternatives to industrial food
chains – represent a viable path to overcome the limits of food as nourishment concept.
This alternative approach suggests a holistic vision of food, no longer considered as a mere object but as a
relational construct, from an ecological (the relation with the environment, the animals and the plants) and
social (the relation with the producers) point of view. A healthy diet is no longer determined by the
ingestion or the exclusion of determined nutrients but by the idea that the health of the body and that of
the environment are interconnected. Eating, here, becomes “an agricultural act” (Berry 1990): food
consumption influences agricultural practices that, in turn, have an impact on the ways food is transformed
and consumed, with important consequences on the quality of life, on the individual's health, on the beauty
of landscapes, on the well-being of animals, on biodiversity and earth. From this perspective, eating is an
economic and political act and social actors are not passive consumers: they are co-producers, coparticipants of the food-chain, responsible for their alimentary choices and the social and ecological
consequences they entail. The social actor becomes an intentional agent, no longer individualized and more
involved in the social and environmental dynamics that interconnect men and food (the reclaim of the
social dimension of food and its relation with nature). Food regains its symbolic value, the sign of
belonging to an integrated world where nature, culture, consumers and producers, individuals and society
reunite.
QUESTIONS
In the globalization context characterized by disorientation and by the redefinition of the sense of
belonging, what is the symbolic and material role played by food in the definition of cultural identity or
otherness?
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3. Food heritage
Scientific referee: Marinella Carosso, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milano
Referees:
Prof. Michael Herzfeld, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University (USA) answered at the related
questions with video interview in Milan, July 8, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDuUiCsp9K4&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaTGOZhfDac&feature=youtu.be
Dottor Charles-Edouard De Suremain, Institut de Recherche pour le Développemment, Parigi (Francia)
will answer at the meeting, December 5, 2014 in Milan
Prof. Fabio Paresecoli, The New School for Public Engagement, New York (USA) will answer at the
meeting April, 27-28, 2015. (At 23.10.2014 its presence remains to be confirmed)
Referrals at International Workshop Food Heritage, Alba, November, 11-12, 2014
Dott.ssa Noriko Aikawa, Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Gouvernement (Japan)
Prof. Igor Steffan Ayora-Diaz, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Merida (Mexico)
Dott.ssa Rachel Black, Boston University (USA)
Dott.ssa Carlotta Colombatto, Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino (Italy)
Prof.ssa Julia Csergo, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal (Canada)
Prof.ssa Marion Demossier, University of Southampton, Southampton (UK)
Prof. Jean-Pierre Garcia, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon (France)
Prof. Adriano Favole, Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino (Italy)
Dott. Gilles Laferté, I.N.R.A., Dijon (France)
Prof. Ferdinando Mirizzi, Università degli Studi di Matera, Matera (Italy)
Prof.ssa Cristina Papa, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia (Italy)
Dott.ssa Daniela Perco, Museo Etnografico della Provincia di Belluno e del Parco Nazionale delle Dolomiti,
Seravella di Cesiomaggiore, Belluno (Italy)
Dott. José Sobral, Universidad de Lisboa, Lisbona (Portugal)
Prof. Angelo Torre, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli (Italy)
The concept of “cultural heritage” is better known in Italy under the name of “Beni Culturali”. Historically
it has developed from the domain of the so called “Belle Arti” and from a hierarchical and static vision of
the landscapes meant as art piece
The institutionalization of the “Ethnological Heritage” by the hand of the French Cultural Ministry in the
1980, has encouraged new conceptions of heritage, as seen from below; the material culture, the objects of
everyday life as well as people as agents of memories and knowledge become relevant part of the what is
intended as living heritage. The French conception of the ethnological heritage anticipates and influences
the elaboration of the category of “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by Unesco in 2003, highly wanted by
Japan.
1. With the category of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”, (whose definition is strongly debated among
Unesco states members) food practices officially enter in the process of heritage institutionalization
(Herzfeld, 2014 in press, Tornatore 2012). Despite its ‘materiality’, food is considered by UNESCO to be
part of the ‘intangible’ heritage.
Often the cultural policy-makers and the middle-class society, close to a “ciceronian” vision of culture, are
not inclined to recognize humble practices as a heritage’s expression. According to this position, such kind
of activities can become part of a heritage only through their very “artification”, their own turning into
“art” and so getting more social prestige. We can find an example of this in the success of “culinary arts” or
“arts of the table”.
Indeed, the recognition of food practices as an institutionalized category within the wider domain of “Beni
Culturali” is quite recent. Some terms used by the media, such as “typical products” or “food tradition”,
often turning into clichés and stereotypes, have been taken by the public opinion as markers of regional
“quality” and “authenticity”. Because of that, as well as for the repeated food industry’s scandals and
changing nutritional patterns, the consumers have redirected their trust to the protected designation of
origin products (Pdo) rather than to the small local producers. The phenomenon is seen with different
perspectives in Europe and North America. In the United States, for example, the “farm products” are the
real new wave in terms of food trends: the most important criteria leading consumers’ choice is the local
nature of production instead of looking for the certification labels. In Europe, this epochal food cultural
change has brought to the making of cultural policies, following the agricultural and touristic policies that
that have influenced them. The focus of these polices is directed to the patrimonialisation of products,
territories, food practices and diets. This implies decisions, exclusions and conflicts since not everything
can be turn into cultural heritage, not everything is transmissible.
2. The interest showed by the institutional cultural politics for the heritagization has involved much more
the countries from the South of Europe than those from the Nord. In England, the term of cultural heritage
shifts the emphasis from the original and legalist approach where the heritage is thought as “father’s
heritage”, to one that recognizes the agency of people that inherits it. The English patrimonial ideology has
got a private or associative connotation as showed by the National Trust’ case. Instead in South Europe
the cultural heritage is intended as public good accessible to all. The heritage anthropology as
ethnographic study of the heritage politics- and than not only of what is included in the category of etnoanthropological subjects-, during the last few decades has established itself as forefront sector of cultural
anthropology. The verb “patrimonialize” and the noun heritagization ,originally economical terms, have been
firstly used by a sociologist (Bourdin, 1992) for the critical analysis of the cultural politics. Introduced in
Italy since the end of the 90’s from Berardino Palumbo that has produced much research on the ups and
downs of the heritage imaginary in Eastern Sicily. (Palumbo, 2006, 2009, 2011). Palumbo suggested three
different postures as characterizing the knowing process: internal, critical and participative. In the internal
one, the researchers look at specifics “slices” of the heritage “cake” without considering the ingredients.
The critical posture is concerned with the study of the heritage process within the wider political
anthropology. Instead the researchers that take the participative posture as a standpoint are aware of (and
then critical about) the political character of the heritagization process. The lively international debate
about heritarigisation has made clear the often used reference to a vague conception of tradition and the
oblivion of the historical processes.
3. There is not an unambiguous definition for food heritage. Since it is both a commodity and a perishable
heritage, it opens to new paths of research and it needs to be more objectified. Is the food heritage so only if
institutionalized? Can the anthropological and social research, with their emphasis on the processes of
inter-generational transmission, make a contribution for a social and historical awareness of food practices
and for their very preservation?
How to define the food heritage? As a product, as a system of knowledge or as a practical expertise?
We should mention to France as both a common area for case studies and for the copious corpus of
research made. For Bérard (2014), the food heritage is selective since it is “a choice among traditions”.
Bérard and Marchenay (1998) problematized the procedures of heritagization of something that is still alive
and they point at the consequences. For Csergo (2014), the food heritage has not only to do with food, but
also with a gastronomic and culinary heritage. In addition to that, the heritage for the author has to be
institutionalized. For Csergo (2011), the gastronomy is not marked by the common connotation of an
elitist practice, costly and that has to do only with the haut cuisine of big chefs that have often become
media characters. Rather, the gastronomy for Csergo is a social practice that implies practical knowledge in
the kitchen and habits of good behavior around the table. Csergo calls it a Humanism of the table. Someone
says that the heritarization goes hand in hand with gastronomisation (Poulain 2012); others point to the
ambiguity of the immaterial food heritage from the point of view of the South (de Suremain, 2012). During
a French research meeting (Le patrimoine culturel immatériel) it came out that the “food practices cannot be
reduced to one or more phases of processing, but that they are part of a structured and complex process
that goes from the research of the ingredients to the act of consuming it”. Indeed, a single part cannot be
taken as representative of the whole process, a whole that has to be considered as transmissible and then
continuously changing (Hottin, 2009). The ethnological category of rural cultural heritage (Chiva, 1994) has
become a central issue for the international lobbies of the activists of food and it has been criticized by
sociological research (Laferté e Renahy, 2003). Laferté (2006) highlights how the folkorization of the
Burgundi’s winegrowers of the 30’s and 40’s has been exploited for commercial ends from the big winery.
In the French contest, the untranslatable concept of terroir is strictly linked to the historical processes that
have contributed to the food heritagization, first in the domain of national agricultural politics, and then at
the European level in terms also of cultural policies. Since the terroir has been globalized, becoming a key
word for the lobbies of food activists, for membership corporations, as well as for marketing and
communication agencies and the media, has become also a “trap concept”, as the ethnologist Laurence
Bérard suggests, often unsuitable to the emerging countries. It is true that the terroir has been a useful
concept for activating the process sustainable development at the local level, but it is also time to think
about the link between societies and places. For Bérard, we should see beyond the issues of registered
designation of origin, and ask ourselves how the places are perceived by whose cultivate or live in them,
how they become meaningful to people and how they are perceived by the collective imagination of
consumers who long for eating and drinking them.
QUESTIONS
What could research do in order to make sure that food heritage does not correspond to normative
specifications, production regulations or other dedicated institutions and make sure that it indeed becomes
a shared legacy, such as a public good guaranteeing food security, accessible to a wider population, hence
being able to transform the relationship among producers, distributors and consumers?
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