Heritage Cuisines

Traditions, identities and tourism

Dallen J. Timothy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367185022
• eBook ISBN: 9781317618409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Food is one of the most fundamental elements of culture and a significant marker of regional and ethnic identity. It encompasses many other elements of cultural heritage beyond the physical ingredients required for its production. These include folklore, religion, language, familial bonds, social structures, environmental determinism, celebrations and ceremonies, landscapes, culinary routes, smells, and tastes, to name but a few. However, despite all that is known about foodways and cuisine from hospitality, gastronomical, supply chain and agricultural perspectives, there still remains a dearth of consolidated research on the wide diversity of food and its heritage attributes and contexts.

This edited volume aims to fill this void by consolidating into a single volume what is known about cuisines and foodways from a heritage perspective and to examine and challenge the existing paradigms, concepts and practices related to gastronomic practices, intergenerational traditions, sustainable agriculture, indigenous rituals, immigrant stories and many more heritage elements as they pertain to comestible cuisines and practices. The book takes a global and thematic approach in examining heritage cuisines from a wide range of perspectives, including agriculture, hunting and gathering, migration, ethnic identity and place, nationalism, sustainability, colonialism, food diversity, religion, place making, festivals, and contemporary movements and trends. All chapters are rich in empirical examples but steady and sound in conceptual depth.

This book offers new insight and understanding of the heritage implications of cuisines and foodways. The multidisciplinary nature of the content will appeal to a broad academic audience in the fields of tourism, gastronomy, geography, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

1 Introduction

Heritage cuisines, foodways and culinary traditions

Dallen J. Timothy

Introduction

Humans have a habit of eating. For thousands of years, Homo sapiens have foraged for food, including hunting animals, fishing and gathering fruits and wild grains. Throughout human history, hunting methods have changed, gathering techniques have been perfected and with the domestication of plants and animals, farming methods developed. Although most residents of the developed world and many in the developing world have ready access to food products at grocery stores or markets, some people still hunt, fish and forage for the majority of their food. Certain groups in the Arctic and the tropics maintain their hunting and foraging traditions for the sake of expediency and out of necessity (Searles 2001, 2002), especially in remote areas where supermarkets are uncommon.

Others forage as a means of supplementing their household budgets or food supplies, enjoying the recreational element of being out in nature with family and friends, appreciating the naturalness of the wild comestibles they gather, or they forage because it is a tradition – a part of their personal heritage (Hall 2013; Pouta et al. 2006; Vaara et al. 2013). For the same reasons, ‘lifestyle’ farmers or hobby gardeners choose to cultivate small landholdings, kitchen gardens or minor allotments – because of a deep-seated desire to produce what they eat, to maintain part of their heritage, to preserve heirloom plant and animal varieties and for the obvious health benefits.

Food and foodways, including hunting, gathering, agriculture, aliment preparation and consumption, are an extremely important part of cultural heritage. All components of culture – features of communication, cognition, material objects and behavior – are somehow connected to food. Language describes or represents cuisines, and food elements are commonly used as symbols in societies to represent various meanings. Ideas and human creativity have led, through trial and error, to the development of world-famous gastronomies and epicurean delights. Knowledge and experience inform people about what crops will grow where and how best to cook them, and with knowledge, foodways and recipes are passed down to the next generation. Beliefs, from a religious perspective, determine relationships between humankind and deity, with food being an intermediary influence. Social mores frequently determine who eats first or when certain meals should be consumed, and food plays a crucial role in the ritualization of everyday life and extraordinary events (Di Giovine 2014; Son and Xu 2013). As well, the material culture of food can manifest in many different ways: ingredients, cooking accoutrements and recipe books (Bannerman 1996).

Foodways and cuisines constitute elements of culture and are therefore an important part of human heritage (Anderson 2014; Civitello 2004; Counihan and Esterik 2013; Denker 2003; Katz and Weaver 2003; Kittler et al. 2012; Miele 2006; Miele and Murdoch 2002). This chapter introduces cuisines as cultural heritage. It examines the ways in which cuisines and foodways are preserved or modified by native peoples, colonial powers and waves of migration. It also speculates on the evolution of peasant food to widespread culinary delights, surveys the role of agriculture and terroir in regional gastronomic specialties and examines the role of tourism as a consumer of heritage cuisines.

Cultural heritage and its uses

From the cultural industries and conservation perspectives, heritage means what we as humans inherit from the past and use in the present (Graham et al. 2000; Timothy 2011). It may be tangible (e.g. monuments, buildings, coal mines, railway stations, artwork or museum pieces) or it may be intangible (e.g. beliefs, flavors, sounds, activities or social relations). There is a general misperception that heritage refers only to buildings or other physical artifacts. Prevailing confusion, especially within the tourism industry, also seems to suggest that heritage must be very old or ancient, and that it must be lavish or grandiose (e.g. castles, cathedrals, fortresses, palaces, elaborate gardens, mansions and government buildings). However, given the meaning of heritage – inheritances that are used for our benefit today – it is clear that cultural heritage may also be intangible, newer than ancient and in many cases very ordinary (Timothy 2014a, 2014b). There are many uses of the past that render it the consumable product known as ‘heritage’.

Education is one of the most pervasive applications of heritage. The past is an important teaching tool and is frequently included in official school curricula. Schoolchildren and university students alike consume the past in their pursuits of knowledge, regardless of their academic majors or courses of study. The past is also utilized as a substance of scientific research. Archaeologists use heritage to reveal truths about people and civilizations that have gone before us. Human geographers use heritage to unpack the meanings inherent in cultural landscapes, urban configurations and other spatial manifestations of human behavior. Biologists and medical scholars utilize formulas, toolkits, paradigms and conjectures that are based on time-tested assumptions and hypotheses.

Government regimes and people in power regularly use heritage for a variety of political purposes (Timothy 2011). The past is used to encourage patriotism and allegiance to a nation, leader or administration. Tangible and intangible heritages are frequently manipulated for propagandizing purposes to build solidarity and unity. Secondly, but similarly, heritage is used to indoctrinate foreign tourists. History can be retold or rewritten to convince visitors of the utopian values of a society or to extol its many virtues. This was a common practice in the former communist countries of Europe and continues to be in several remaining socialist states today. Finally, heritage may also be used to tell a version of history that never existed, or to block embarrassing or disturbing events from history in a form of societal amnesia, or an intentional forgetting of what happened before, which may even include rewriting history books and the educational curriculum.

Heritage is also the focus of artists, architects, art enthusiasts and cooks, and it is prized for its visual, aural, gustatory and olfactory qualities (Boswell 2008; Kong 1999; Stringfellow et al. 2013). Consider the use of Doric, Corinthian or Ionic architecture in New World building designs and the blueprints of modern health spas and resorts that are reminiscent of ancient Roman baths. The co-mingling of wheat flour and cornmeal in tortilla making by Mexican chefs reveals a great deal about the colonial relationships between the Spanish metropole and the indigenes of New Spain, and what it means to be Mexican (Long-Solís and Vargas 2005; Pilcher 1996). Modern jazz and blues are part of an acoustic heritage based upon the musical traditions of African-American slaves (Martin 2012).

Among the most pervasive users of cultural heritage are tourists and other leisure visitors. Cultural heritage–based tourism relies on a supply of places, events, ideas and objects from the past (Timothy 2011). Tourists visit tangible heritage (e.g. museums, churches, cemeteries, factories, temples), partake of intangible heritage (e.g. music, dance, celebrations, folklore), overnight in heritage lodging (e.g. historic hotels, country inns, dude ranches), and dine at heritage food services (e.g. ethnic restaurants, sidewalk cafés, diners, historic restaurants). They may even travel to and from, or within, the destination on heritage transportation, such as historic railways, nostalgic buses, old cars or preserved ships and riverboats.

All of these and many other heritage consumers (e.g. farmers, fishers and religious pilgrims) are directly related to food and gastronomy. Leaders and groups in power are known to use food as a nationalistic instrument for uniting populations, or at least trying to, and they may also use food in direct or indirect ways to determine a country’s national dishes through inclusionary or exclusionary practices (Chen 2011; Helstosky 2004; Morris 2013; Watson and Caldwell 2005). Educators and researchers seek to understand historic foods and traditional foodways of people everywhere. Artists not only paint or sculpt images of food, but also in many ways cooking methods and gastronomic customs become art forms in their own right. Tourists’ and tourism service providers’ use of heritage cuisines hardly needs an explanation. Cultural tourists in particular frequently seek out heritage foods as part of their cultural immersion. Many consume local foods, participate in indigenous alimentary rituals and buy representative food souvenirs (Swanson and Timothy 2012).

Food and cuisine: The cultural heritage of eating

After considering the various uses of heritage and food, it is clear that gastronomic traditions and even the alimentary materials prepared and consumed are among the most pervasive and obvious constituents of cultural heritage (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). Perhaps more than any other element of human culture, cuisine and foodways provide indispensable insight into the history of humankind (Timothy 2007). Food’s heritage role is most evident in how it reflects the cultural norms and values of people, places and times; elucidates the realities of geography and place; and signals humankind’s struggle to survive nature and indeed subdue it. Cuisines tell stories of refinement through contacts with other societies and civilizations, and food’s clear imprint on other heritage components (e.g. religion, language, music, folklore, earthly knowledge and family life) is unmistakable.

Indigenous people, colonialism and migration

Prior to their contact with outsiders, aboriginal peoples ate whatever food was available. Their diets were determined by a variety of environmental factors, including weather and climate, abundance or scarcity of water, soil quality and the available range of endemic or indigenous plants and animals. While the tenets of pure environmental determinism have long been debated in the geographical sciences, it is obvious that the environment did govern what native peoples could consume (Frenkel 1992; Kuhnlein and Turner 1991; Nunn 2003; Rotherham 2008).

Ancient travel for trade and exploration in areas such as East Asia and the Mediterranean introduced new food practices and ingredients. The ancient Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans were especially adept at cross-pollinating foods from their travels. Throughout the Roman Empire period, European foods were influenced by flavors and techniques derived from various parts of the imperial hinterland.

Later, during the ‘age of discovery’, or period of European transoceanic explorations, which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the contributors
• 1 Introduction: Heritage cuisines, foodways and culinary traditions
• 2 The raw, the cooked and the fermented: The culinary heritage of foragers, past and present
• 3 Cuisine, migration, colonialism and diasporic identities
• 4 Food, heritage and nationalism
• 5 Personal heritage, intergenerational food and nostalgia
• 6 Agricultural heritage, agritourism and rural livelihoods
• 7 Heirloom products in heritage places: Farmers’ markets, local food and food diversity
• 8 Religious heritage, spiritual aliment and food for the soul
• 9 Iconic cuisines, marketing and place promotion
• 10 Culinary trails
• 11 Food festivals and heritage awareness
• 12 Reflections on slow food: From ‘movement’ to an emergent research field
• 13 Conclusion: Heritage cuisines and the patrimony of food
• Index