Food and culture. Cultural patterns and practices related to food in everyday life. Introduction

Abstract

As an everyday activity, sustaining our life, eating experiences reveal complex relationship between food and society, involving material and symbolic aspects of cultures, dietary order, but also aesthetics or hedonism (Lévi-Strauss, 1964, Douglas, 1966, Fischler, 1980, Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). Bringing on stage cultural values, food becomes a central identity marker, defining personality, social class, lifestyles, gender roles and relationships, from family, to community, to ethnic groups or nationality, changing through time and place. Food is a lens to analyze society order, historical changes, power and politics, if we think of the pioneering works in this area of studies, from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the social classes’ taste (1979), Jack Goody’s connection between cuisine and class in West Africa (1982), Sidney Mintz research on sugar, modern times and colonialism (1985), to Arjun Appadurai’s work on nationalism and cuisines (1988).