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that constitute a food or drink (Prescott), it also describes cultural preferences and eating patterns (Korsmeyer, Introduction). Because it involves
selection and discrimination, taste further expresses social, economic, political, and cultural distinctions (Weiss). As a social construction, home is
either bound to a physical place imbued with domestic notions of privacy,
identity, and family (Somerville; Zahra) or conceived of as a broader geographical place in terms of locality, region, or nation (Bowlby, Gregory, and
McKie; Mallett). Besides their respective physiological and material aspects,
both taste and home emerge as subjective and relative concepts in constant
redefinition whose meanings vary according to context. Studied together,
they open up new and fascinating paths for social scientific investigation by
enabling us to assess the ways in which home can be expressed through
food, thus answering the basic question of what home tastes like.
Based on these observations and the realization that the taste of home
had not been addressed directly by food scholars yet, we decided to organize
a conference in order to explore the multidimensional and dynamic meanings
of these concepts and how they interact. The conference successfully took
place in Brussels in 2012 under the initial title of A Taste of Home and attracted
contributions from various disciplines. We selected a series of papers that
makes up this special issue under the new title of Tastes of Homes. This
title change reflects the conferences conclusions that called for contextual,
subjective, and relative understandings of taste and home. In other words,
with this series of articles, we wish to contribute to existing theorization on
taste and home and bridge a gap in foodways research. We do so via place, a
notion thatas touched upon above and discussed in the followingplays
an overriding role in the social construction of the concept of home. Thus
the main research question we address in this collection of articles is how
place contributes to tastes of homes.
This special issue presents five articlesorganized in chronological order according to the period discussedthat explore the relationships between tastes and homes in Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Italy, and Ireland
throughout the twentieth century. In order to answer our research question
in a comprehensive manner, we have opted for a multidisciplinary approach
that draws on the scholarly fields of architecture, history, linguistics, and media studies. Hence, the authors base their studies on a wide array of sources
that go beyond usual historical and anthropological material. Besides the
analysis of archival records, interviews, and observations, they also work
with womens magazines, advertisements, medical treatises, and films. We
focus on Europe during the twentieth century, when the internationalization and industrialization of the food chain increasingly provoked feelings
of displacement (Fischler) and the consequential longing for domesticity, regionalism, and nationalism, reflected in relation to food. Before we present
the articles and their empirical analyses, we review the research already
conducted on the notions of taste, home, and place.
Introduction
UNDERSTANDING TASTE
As of the 1970s, taste has captured a great deal of sociologists attention in
their analyses of the social determination of taste and the differences in
tastes in various groups and classes in society (Gronow ix). According to
these sociological insights, taste refers to cultural preferences that are cultivated within social groups and that distinguish them from one another.
Taste thus simultaneously entails both acceptance and rejection. Moreover,
the notion equals a classification of culture that implies a hierarchization
in terms of good and bad or high and low. The rationale is that the better ones education, the higher ones taste in, say, music and art and the
more ones belonging to the social group that adheres to that particular taste
(Bourdieu; Milne). Besides the sociological treatises on taste as collective
knowledge, some philosophical and psychological studies have delved into
the notion as an individual and subjective experience. The aim of these
studies was to map the uniqueness of individuals subjective taste, but in
the end, they proved that even though taste can be individual and subjective, it is almost always kneaded and even determined by social standards
(Milne).
A similar storyline developed within the field of food studies with the
discipline first focusing on taste as cultural preferences and then on the
subjective nature of the notion. Since the 1980s, the notion of taste has
increasingly been studied in relation to food. The lions share of publications have taken a socio-economic approach and equated taste to everyday
eating practicesi.e. the use of particular foodstuffs, modes of preparation, and dishesstrongly influenced by societal context. Research questions were predominantly historically inspired and evolved around the longterm evolution of food habits in Europe. They looked for causalities between changes in these habits and thus in taste on the one hand and
socio-economic transformations on the other (for a literature review, see
von Hoffmann).
By the end of the 1990s, however, some anthropological publications
started applying a cultural approach that emphasized mentalities and discourses instead of eating practices. They went beyond the Eurocentric scope
and mainly focused on present-day communities in Asia, Africa, and Russia. They interpreted taste as a gustatory experience and analyzed how the
concept relates to the individual and the community. Importantly, the approach has shown that taste involves subjective cultural distinctions that are
constantly redefined on both a personal and a collective level. The notions
meaning thus depends on context and ideology, which is why it is best
to refer to taste in the plural (Jung and Sternsdorff Cisterna; Korsmeyer,
Making Sense of Taste, Introduction; Sutton, Food and the Senses; von
Hoffmann).
UNDERSTANDING HOME
Before we can analyze home from the perspective of taste, it is necessary
to explore the concepts multiple meanings. Traces of the notion go back
to at least the Middle Ages, and it has attracted intense scholarly attention, especially after the 1980s, from the fields of anthropology, architecture, archeology, geography, history, linguistics, psychology, and sociology
(Benjamin and Stea; Mallet). Its study has generated an impressive amount
of literature, which testifies to the pertinent role it has played throughout
human history, the difficulty of defining it, and the richness of its discursive
possibilities (see, for example, Rapport and Dawson).
In order to illustrate the concepts complexity, sociologist Shelley Mallet
provided both a condensed and an exhaustive description of the term in her
extensive survey. According to her, the term home functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas
about peoples relationship with one another, especially family, and with
places, spaces, and things (Mallet 84). More specifically then, she continued,
[h]ome can be a dwelling place or a lived space of interaction between
people, places, things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can
be permeable and/or impermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural,
alienable and/or inalienable, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associated with feelings of comfort, ease intimacy, relaxation
and security and/or oppression, tyranny and persecution. It can or cannot
be associated with family. Home can be an expression of ones (possibly
fluid) identity and sense of self and/or ones body might be home to
the self. It can constitute belonging and/or create a sense of marginalization and estrangement. Home can be given and/or made, familiar and/or
strange, an atmosphere and/or an activity, a relevant and/or irrelevant
concept. It can be fundamental and/or extraneous to existence. Home
can be an ideological construct and/or an experience of being in the
world. It can be a crucial site for examining relations of production
and consumption, globalization and nationalism, citizenship and human
rights, and the role of government and governmentality. Equally it can
provide a context for analyzing ideas and practices about intimacy, family,
kinship, gender, ethnicity, class, age and sexuality. Such ideas can be inflected in domestic architecture and interior and urban design. (Mallet 84)
Introduction
and an imagined place by the subjects expressing and studying it. In other
words, we concentrate on the social constructions of home through food
and the contexts in which they take place.
If home is a place, what then do we mean by place? Places express
themselves as physical structures and socially constructed ideas that articulate and frame social relations (Crang; Low; Massey, A Place Called Home,
Places and Their Pasts). They are woven together through space and can
be understood as changing constellations of human commitments, capacities, and strategies (Agnew 90). Places are constantly in the process of
becoming and provide the framework for all human interactions (Till 75). A
sense of place then becomes particularly acute for the individuals and groups
studied in this special issue who deal on a daily basis with the consequences
of displacement, i.e. of a sense of a geographical world where cultural lives
and economic processes are characterized not only by the points in space
where they take and make place, but also by the movements to, from, and
between those points (Cook and Crang 138).
Like Dorothy who, in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, clicks her heels,
shuts her eyes, and fervently repeats, Theres no place like home in the
hope of returning to that lost haven, most of us have an idea of home as a
place of origin, a place of belonging, a place to which to return (Bowlby,
Gregory, and McKie).1 Home thus emerges as an emotional place permeated
by memories central to defining who and where we are. Anthropologist
James Fernandez has expressed well the human desire for transcendence
following various types of displacement as a return to the whole, where
the whole is understood as a state of relatednessa kind of conviviality in
experience brought about by a ritualistic process that attempts to revitalize
the past (Fernandez 191). Furthermore, these feelings of belonging conjured
up by home can be accessed and reignited through the experience of taste,
as many studies of nostalgia, migration, and the search for familiar and past
foodways have shown (for example: Duruz; Weinreb).
Moreover, the key to understanding home then lies in the subjects who
use the notion, the places and movements involved, and the contexts in
which subjects and objects evolve. For these reasons, it is bestlike for
tastesto refer to home in the plural and take a closer look at the attention the relations between food and home have attracted by foodways
researchers.
Introduction
their own flexible notions of home and alternative uses of domestic spaces
(Hareven).
Besides negotiating the ambiguity between public display and a search
for privacy (Stone), the domestic home expresses identity and articulates gender and power relations among household members (Somerville). The home
has been seen and criticized as a female inside environment opposed to a
male outside world, while its organization has been studied as a material reflection of the distribution of resources allocated to build and run it (Bowlby,
Gregory, and McKie). Providing decent housing for alldespite a state of
homelessness in which some people livesearching for an ideal house, and
constructing a comfortable home have proven central to human relations
over the centuries, especially during the twentieth century in Europe (Betts
and Crowley;5 De Caigny; Rybczynski). Thus, home can be seen as a social
edifice that embodies meanings, values, and attributes that reflect the different beliefs and experiences of its builders (Bowlby, Gregory, and McKie).
In the realm of food studies, home as a material place has been addressed via its domestic features. In relation to food, these features involve
home cooking, food provisioning, distribution, and consumption, meal patterns, diet, gender roles, and power relations in the home (Counihan and
Kaplan; Neuhaus; Parasecoli and Scholliers6; Valentine; Warde). Unsurprisingly, most of these issues revolve around the domestic kitchen where food
is organized, prepared, served, and/or consumed, generally under female
supervision (Craik). In postwar Europe, the introduction of the refrigerator
into homes revolutionized the kitchen and the entire domestic organization
and preparation of food. Two articles in this special issue address this revolution and the ultimate normalization of the refrigerator in our homes, albeit
from different perspectives. Willem Scheire analyzes the advertisements for
refrigerators published in a series of womens magazines in Belgium between 1955 and 1965 and shows how advertising discourses surrounding
this new technological device carried with them multiple and evolving ideals of domesticity. He discusses the construction of home in terms of comfort,
care, aesthetics, and choice, thus alternating between notions of taste and
meanings of home. Rhona Richman Keneally analyzes the presentation and
advertizing of refrigerators in magazines and model homes and their introduction into homes and community cookbooks in Ireland in the 1960s and
1970s. She explores taste from both its sensory and aesthetic angles and
demonstrates the roles they played in promoting refrigeration and changing
food practices in the domestic environment.
communities, i.e. communities that do not originate ex nihilo but that come
into being by means of discourses that in turn express feelings of identity and
thus construct a community among a collectivity of individuals over a period
of time. Anderson confined his theory to national identity and investigated
the vocabulary that is used in order to imagine or construct that identity.
He concluded that nation is often referred to as home or Heimati.e. a
homeland in Germanand thus as a place that one belongs to (Anderson).
Empirical research exploring nation and national identity supports Andersons thesis (e.g. Winland), yet it also broadens the scope by discerning a
regional and urban dimension. Besides national communities interpreting the
nation as home, regional and urban communities have also considered a region or a city as their Heimat (Roth and Brunnbauer). Imagined communities
therefore not only pertain to nation but to region and city too.
Food studies may not yet have explored nation, region, or city from
the viewpoint of home, but they do gather quite a number of publications
dealing with national, regional, or urban identity. Geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have all looked at the use of place names
in relation to foodways and have demonstrated the relationship between
geographical indications on the one hand and feelings of belonging and
identity on the other (for a literature review, see Geyzen). Interestingly, the
analyses all demonstrate the latent presence of gastrolinguistics, i.e. they
all support the thesis that national, regional, or urban foodways are not a
natural given but become national, regional, or urban when named as such
(Lakoff). The use of place names thus entails a process of meaning making
whereby place-bound foodways and feelings of belonging are constructed
(Parys). Furthermore, the use of place names in se leads to feelings of exclusion as well. Individuals or groups who do not identify with particular
geographical indications are excluded from the corresponding place-bound
foodways and identity constructions. Finally, place-bound foodways and
their related feelings of belonging can be multidimensional as the use of
geographical indications can refer to more than one place at the same time.
The use of the French notion of terroir illustrates this well: Terroir first
equates small-scale places in France and then pertains to the combination
of those places into France (Ferri`eres; Trubek, Place Matters, The Taste of
Place).
Finally, it is important to have a look at how the use of place names
relates to the concept of tastes. In order to justify this relationship, the notion
of typicality has come to the surface, meaning that when geographical indications are used, they immediately suggest aspects of quality and origin that
in turn define tastes. The use of place names thus indicates the relationship
between geography and tastes with the latter originating in the former. In
other words, ingredients or dishes typical tastes emanate from geography
(Ceccarelli, Grandi, and Magagnoli). It must however be pointed out that
the relationship between geography and taste is a social construction that
Introduction
says more about the community using the place name than it does about the
foodways themselves (Geyzen; Trubek, The Taste of Place).
In this special issue, the notion of home as an imagined place in relation
to food is approached from three different perspectives. Fabio Parasecoli analyzes representations of food in Italian Neorealist films in the search for
constructions of home in postwar Italy. He analyzes food scenes and finds
that they unravel cultural and political debates on the future of the country
and express the filmmakers view on what private homes and what type
of a homeland Italy should be. Elitsa Stoilova explores how Bulgaria became the homeland of yoghurt during the twentieth century. She scrutinizes
medical treatises and advertisements and concludes that the actors exploited
the yoghurts inherent characteristics for its Bulgarianization. The products
sour taste and salutary effects on longevity were thus inextricably linked to
Bulgaria as their homeland. Furthermore, these characteristics also instigated
yoghurts growing popularity in Europe where the products Bulgarianization
was considered as a form of exoticism. Sylvie Durmelat analyzes the use of
food and especially of couscous scenes in Maghrebi-French diasporic films
whose plots take place during the second half of the twentieth and the first
decade of the twenty-first centuries. She uses the concepts of culinary citizenship and ethnic body to discuss reconfigurations of home in a migratory
context and finds that cinematic couscous serves to articulate changing tastes
for changing homes along various axes.
CONCLUSION
The collection of articles that makes up Tastes of Homes draws inspiration
from our desire to discover what home can taste like in various geographical and temporal contexts. It also aims to fill a void in the food studies
literature on the relationship between both concepts. The authors included
hereafter explore the multidimensional and dynamic meanings of tastes and
homes and their interactions in innovative ways and along four thematic
axes. The first considers taste either as an expression of social and cultural
distinction or as a sensory practice and is discussed in detail by Scheire and
Richman Kenneally. The second looks at the tensions between private and
public aspects of homes and tastes, and is tackled in-depth by Parasecoli and
Stoilova. The third explores varied and new meanings associated with home
and expressed through changing food and tastes (see especially Durmelats
article). Finally, the fourth proposes innovative methodological approaches
and sources in order to study the taste of home, innovations provided by all
the authors in this special issue. Moreover, all theses aspects are engaged
via place, a notion that plays an overriding role in the social construction
of the concept of home and taste, interpreted from both a material and an
imagined viewpoint.
10
NOTES
1. This is not always true, as Mary Douglas talks of the tyranny of the home (Douglas).
2. A search in The Food Bibliography proves this periodization: http://www.foodbibliography.eu/
index_en.asp.
3. See, for example, the special issue published by Anthropology of Food 7 (2010).
4. The contemporary equivalence of the English word house with home seems to be the
linguistic waste product of the American real-estate industry that, in the late nineteenth century, equated
both terms in order to enhance the real estate value of houses and distinguish a home from a whore-house
(Hollander 41).
5. See the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History 40.2 (2005) on the meanings of
home in postwar Europe introduced by Betts and Crowley.
6. We refer here to the series A Cultural History of Food consisting of six volumes, each containing
a chapter on food, family, and domesticity.
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