Project description
Understanding how migration alters eating patterns
Migration can influence cuisine flavour and eating habits, yet we lack an analytical method for systematically examining these phenomena. The ERC-funded TASTE project investigates the global dissemination of cooking techniques, products, dishes, recipes, food practices and taste hierarchies. By focusing on three Indonesian diasporas, the project aims to identify how cuisines evolve post-migration, how diverse culinary traditions impact one another, and the mechanisms driving these processes. The project will gather and analyse recipes and food descriptions, supplemented by ‘following-the-things’ approaches, narrative research, ‘gastrolinguistic’ analysis and sensory elicitation. The insights from this study have the potential to promote sustainable consumption patterns and address food-related issues worldwide.
Objective
How and why do cuisines change after migration? The TASTE Project offers a novel approach to study the global spread of cooking techniques, products, dishes, recipes, food practices, and taste hierarchies. By focusing on three relatively old Indonesian diasporas (of Suriname, Sri Lanka, and South Africa), its researchers address the following hypotheses:
1. What people choose to eat is primarily driven by embodied notions of taste;
2. Food preferences are inherited and exchanged;
3. Culinary change significantly resembles linguistic change.
Culinary change is yet to be analyzed comprehensively. While we know from earlier studies that flavor affects food preferences and that migration affects eating patterns, we lack an analytical language and integrated methodology to examine these phenomena systematically. Drawing from the conceptual apparatus of historical linguistics and state-of-the-art fieldwork practices, this project develops a new methodological toolkit to identify with greater precision than before how cuisines evolve after migration, how different culinary traditions influence each other, and which different mechanisms propel these processes. The team will collect and analyze recipes and food descriptions from three countries housing Indonesian diasporas, complemented by following-the-things approaches, narrative research, “gastrolinguistic” analysis, and sensory elicitation.
The project’s three work packages focus on the role of contact-induced borrowing of culinary features (PhD-1), inherited notions of taste (PhD-2), and economic dimensions of food preferences (PhD-3). These subprojects use the same theoretical and methodological framework, but focus on different categories: sweet desserts, food served during feasts, and “poverty food” respectively. The resulting insights on culinary change hold a largely unacknowledged key to promoting more sustainable consumption patterns and mitigating the fast-increasing number of food-related problems worldwtbd
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands