Trajectories of taste: An analytical framework of culinary change after migration

Descripción del proyecto

Comprender cómo la migración altera los hábitos alimentarios

La migración puede influir en el sabor de la cocina y en los hábitos alimentarios, pero carecemos de un método analítico para examinar estos fenómenos de forma sistemática. El equipo del proyecto TASTE, financiado por el CEI, investiga la difusión mundial de técnicas culinarias, productos, platos, recetas, prácticas alimentarias y jerarquías gustativas. Al centrarse en tres diásporas indonesias, en el proyecto se intenta determinar cómo evolucionan las cocinas tras la migración, cómo se influyen mutuamente las diversas tradiciones culinarias y los mecanismos que impulsan estos procesos. En el proyecto se recopilarán y analizarán recetas y descripciones de alimentos, complementadas con métodos de «seguimiento de las cosas», investigación narrativa, análisis «gastrolingüístico» y elicitación sensorial. Las conclusiones de este estudio pueden contribuir a promover pautas de consumo sostenibles y a resolver problemas relacionados con la alimentación en todo el mundo.

Objetivo

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