The Intersections between Food and Cultural Landscape: Insights from Three Mountain Case Studies

Abstract

In the last decades, scholars from different disciplines have used the foodscape as a concept and an analytical framework to explore the intersection between landscape, people and food culture. Adopting a comparative case-study analysis, this article aims to show how a foodscape can be used as a lens to investigate cultural landscapes, specifically in mountain areas affected by fast structural socio-economic and ecological changes, identifying key tangible and intangible elements, the underpinning relationship and values, as well as the factors underlying their evolution and transformation. In this way, the article indicates this concept as a key tool for landscape management and conservation. We discuss three different and complementary approaches to the analysis of cultural landscapes, namely, from food products to landscape analysis (Albania), from food production practices to landscape analysis (Kenya) and from food-related rural architecture to landscape analysis (Italy). Overall, the research highlights how implementing a foodscape lens among the different levels of landscape analysis could contribute to the assessment, protection and promotion of local food-related resources. In so doing, it opens new research aimed at defining the limits of this heuristic instrument, where its most promising aspects of the foodscape have been explored in the article.