Full Description
Making Taste Public takes an ethnographic approach to show how social relations shape - and are shaped by - the taste of food. Recognizing that different cultures have different taste preferences and flavour principles embedded in cuisine, editors Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund ask how these differences are generated. The editors have compiled 14 chapters to show how specific influences become a part of our sensorial apparatus and identity through shared experiences of making, eating, and talking about food.
Using case studies from Asia, Europe and America, the book presents a theory of how taste is made public through everyday practices. The authors are exploring how place, production methods and cooking techniques create tastes. They discuss the criteria determining good and bad tastes, and how tastes and memories evolve over time. Subjects such as how values can be embedded in taste, and the role of taste education in food movements, homes, and schools are explored. The different chapters examine definitions and mobilizations of taste in different institutions, public places, and regions around the world to reveal ethnographic understandings of how people learn, experience, and share taste.
With contributions spanning the Solomon Islands, Denmark, Japan, Canada, France, the USA, and Italy, Making Taste Public is a fascinating account of how our sense of taste is continuously shaped and re-shaped in relation to social and cultural context, societal and environmental premises. The book will interest anyone studying anthropology, sociology, food studies, sensory studies and human geography.
Contents
List of images
List of Contributors
Preface, Carole Counihan (Millersville University, USA) and Susanne Højlund (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Foreword, David Sutton (Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA)
Introduction
1. Making Taste Public: An Ethnographic Approach, Carole Counihan (Millersville University, USA) and Susanne Højlund (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part One: Taste Socialization: Family and Culture
2. Taste, Socialization, and Infancy, Penny Van Esterik (York University, Canada)
3. The Taste of Intervention: Tasting, Eating and Feeding After Weight Loss Surgery, Line Hillersdal (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Bodil Just Christensen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
4. The Taste of Reef: Changing Food Preferences and Taste in a Solomon Island Archipelago Over Forty years, Peter I. Crawford (UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway)
Part Two: Taste, Place, and Intersubjectivity
5. How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds, Katy Overstreet (University of California Santa Cruz, USA and Aarhus University, Denmark)
6. Cultivating a Taste Landscape: Cooperative Winegrowing in Carema, Italy, Rachel Black (Connecticut College, USA)
7. Tasting Comté Cheese, Returning to the Whole: The Jury Terroir as Ritual Practice, Christy Shields (The American University of Paris, France)
Part Three: Taste Education and Sharing: Identity and Community
8. "Listen! We Made these Potatoes Crispy!" Danish Adolescents Sharing Taste in a School Class, Susanne Højlund (Aarhus University, Denmark)
9. Making the Multi-Dimensional Taste of Japanese Cuisine Public, Greg De St. Maurice (University of Toronto, Canada and l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France)
10. Sharing and Transmitting Taste in a Professional Danish Restaurant Kitchen, Jens Sejer Østergaard Rasmussen (Independent Scholar)
11. Teaching to Cook and Learning to Sense in Food Education, Amy Trubek and Maria Carabello (University of Michigan, USA)
Part Four: Taste Politics
12. Taste Activism in Urban Sardinia, Italy, Carole Counihan (Millersville University, USA)
13. Reindeer Fat and the Taste of Place in Sámi Food Activism, Amanda Green (Davidson College, USA)
14. Political Taste: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Slow Food Movement, Valeria Siniscalchi (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France)
15. Tasting Displacement, Reflections on Freshness, Joan Gross (Oregon State University, USA)
Index
