Tourist Productions 2005

If anyone is interested, an anthropologist, David Sutton, explores this power of food to carry place through an ethnographic study of greek immigrants’ relationship to food, and their way of bringing “home” and “home memories” with them through the arts of their kitchens. (the book is called Rememberance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory). Although his work is about immigration and not about tourism (although we might argue that immigration is a type of tourism), Sutton’s work locates food’s chronotopic power not only in the taste buds, but in the social practices around food (for example, preparing the meal, telling food stories from the past, table manners, conversations during meals, etc.).

The relationship between culture, locality and food is certainly evident, but I wonder about whether or not food can be heritage as it is consumed in situ, in the present, or does it have to be dead or dying to be valued as such. The piece on the Slow Food Movement seems to point to the latter. Only when the non-white breasted turkeys were on the verge of extinction were they seen as needing preservation in a rhetoric that is very reminiscent of heritage discourse. Not to mention that a European organization, not the Native American communities that raised, prepared and ate them, is the bearer of the food as heritage flag.

Is the Slow Food Movement not also standardizing and universalizing local heritage, and therefore expropriating it, much like the UNESCO Heritage of Humanity lists? (Here it is interesting to mention that the latest candidate for intangible heritage recognition is Mexican “traditional” cuisine). Is food tangible or intangible heritage if it is heritage at all? How does culinary innovation/fusion fit into the picture? Also, perhaps we could talk about the fascinating paradox that Pollan mentions in his article: food as heritage needs to be consumed in order to be preserved.