Recipes and Reciprocity

Building Relationships in Research

Hannah Tait Neufeld, Elizabeth Finnis, Hannah Tait Neufeld, Elizabeth Finnis

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780887552977
• eBook ISBN: 9780887552939
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recipes and Reciprocity considers the ways that food and research intersect for both researchers, participants, and communities demonstrating how everyday acts around food preparation, consumption, and sharing can enable unexpected approaches to reciprocal research and fuel relationships across cultures, generations, spaces, and places.

Drawing from research contexts within Canada, Cuba, India, Malawi, Nepal, Paraguay, and Japan, contributors use the sharing of food knowledge and food processes (such as drying, steaming, mixing, grinding, and churning) to examine topics like identity, community-based research ethics, food sovereignty, and nutrition. Each chapter highlights practical and experiential elements of fieldwork, incorporating storytelling, recipes, and methodological practices to offer insight into how food facilitates relationship-building and knowledge-sharing across geographical and cultural boarders. Contributors to this volume bring a range of disciplinary backgrounds—including anthropology, public health, social work, history, and rural studies—to the exploration of global and Indigenous foodways, perceptions around ethical eating and authenticity, language and food preparation, perspectives on healthy eating, and what it means to develop research relationships through food.

Challenging colonial, heteropatriarchal, and methodological divisions between academic and less formal ways of knowing, Recipes and Reciprocity draws critical attention to the ways food can bridge disciplinary and lived experiences, propelling meaningful research and reciprocal relationships.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Momo Parties: Crafting Dumplings, Knowledge, and Identity in the Field
• Chapter 2. Poppycock and Puffed Rice: Recipe Knowledge in Thai Buddhist Communities
• Chapter 3. Drinking Tea in Nepal
• Chapter 4. Bannock: Using a Contested Bread to Understand Indigenous and Settler Relations and Ways Forward within Canada
• Chapter 5. Evolution and Revolution: Haudenosaunee Histories and Stories of Sustenance and Survival
• Chapter 6. Our Soup Tells Stories: Kitchen Table Conversations about the Connections, Creations, and Traditions of Soup Sharing
• Chapter 7. Making and Eating Chipa and Mbejú in Rural Paraguay
• Chapter 8. Preparing Rice in Contemporary Japan
• Chapter 9. Malawian Small Fry
• Chapter 10. I Serve You and We Serve Each Other: Honouring the Métis Relationships in Research
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index