As a basic activity of humanity that shares aspects with verbal languages, cooking has the capacity to mediate between the abstract and the concrete; between structures and universal principles, and the symbolic spaces where representations of food provide those abstract forms with content. These representations are the basic material of the change and permanent dynamics of the culinary universe. In so far as eating and cooking are natural and cultural acts the act of eating is both natural and social; we have fundamentally made it a social act. The emotional, intellectual and physiological experiences that constitutes it are the building blocks and the evolutionary material of the culinary practice as such.
Food and cuisine are also major topics given current convergences, with several economies around the world in crisis and the provision of food and the right to access it being compromised. Among current debates, the most important subjects in play are food safety – the equitable and sustainable availability of food – and food sovereignty – the possibility and the right of a community to define and decide with a good degree of certainty the agricultural dynamics and culinary systems-.26 The main question could be shifting now with regards to emphasizing the symbolic value of food and of the different meanings of taste, to understand why and who has the right to produce food and have access to it. But the possibility of sustainable production and
26 The protagonists of these processes are the agents that participate in the food production and consumption
chain: producers (peasants and farmers), intermediaries (processors, distributors, traders), and consumers. Said processes and their agents are of interest and competency of governmental, nongovernmental, academic and educational institutions (ministries, educational centers, specialized shops, cooperatives, etc.).
consumption in an ecological and social sense can never be severed from the question of an adequate management of culinary capital. “Both perspectives are necessary for understanding how food and foodways circulate both materially and symbolically in a global context in which culinary capital affirms economic and cultural status across and between nations” (Naccarato and Lebesco 2012: 13. See also Pollan 2008 and 2006). 27
Interestingly, as Johnston and Baumman note in their study of democracy and distinction through an analysis of the concept of ommnivorousness and foodies’ discourses “throughout the 1990s and 2000s, an increasing range of consumers welcomed new ‘ethnic’ cuisines, a world of tastes cultivated by heightened processes of globalization and the diversifying cultural make-up of the population” (Johnston and Baumman 2015: 12). Hierarchizing food has taken new dimensions with this inclusion of the ethnic and exotic, and the value given to the most complex configurations that highlight democratic values such as ecological sustainability, multiculturalism and authenticity (Johnston and Bauman 2015:13).
The growth of marketing fresh, local, organic, artisanal, and other products responds to a “desire” by consumers for products that represent what is real and authentic, as opposed to massive and “faceless” (Johnston and Baumman 2015: 22; Lang 2007: 2-3; Belasco 1989): “One way to achieve a sense of realness and authenticity is by buying foods that feel distant from the industrial system, and developing personal connections with local growers, producers, and chefs. Beyond the local realm, consumers can identify culinary authenticity by a food’s regional specificity”
27 Based on the Bourdieanan concept on culinary capital, Naccarato and Lebesco aim to understand how and why
certain foods or culinary practices connote status and power and represent individual and collective efforts to participate and mold citizenship projects and identities that correspond or question, and in any case are based on, norms and values of a specific society. This, understanding that culinary capital does not circulate in pre-established ways or with predictable patterns, but in multiple and many times contradictory forms (Naccarato 2012; 2.3), is the core of this project.
(Johnston and Baumman 2015: 23).
One of the inherent tensions in this cultural production process is the relation between tradition and innovation that implies a dynamic of action and reaction between “opposite” forces. The process of interpreting traditional cuisines in Colombia and the construction of a new local culinary identity does seem to include exoticization of traditional knowledge and the auto- exoticization of different actors as carriers and consumers of the country’s culinary capital. As Belasco observes “by categorizing foods in [terms of] what’s good to eat and what is not, a cuisine helps a society’s members define themselves: to eat appropriate foods is to participate in a particular group; eat inappropriate foods and you’re an outsider. Like language, a cuisine is a medium by which a society establishes its special identity” (Belasco 1989: 44). As described in Chapter 2, this process in Colombia, besides being extremely rich, colorful and vibrant, is multi- faceted and multidimensional, and in any case defiant because it signifies a marker of status and thus serves as a channel of excluding behaviors but also of initiatives of solidarity and social cohesion.
Referring to the double nature of the production of food – material and cultural –, many have argued that alternative forms of agriculture different from monoculture and industrial agriculture, such as the so-called organic food sector, are connecting us again with the earth – and connecting culture with nature – in a way in which the industrial production of food by definition cannot. Michael Pollan argues that “by buying organic [the consumer] is engaging in authentic experiences and imaginatively enacting a return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact” (Pollan 2006: 137). Pollan also exposes the flaws and inconsistencies of this
food sector.28
For the case of Colombia, the process of building culinary expressions involves practices that can be interpreted as the imitation of foreign models and at the same time as approximations to tradition. Many of the places in which cuisine is enacted (restaurants, festivals, markets and fairs), resemble a cosmopolitan modern setting in terms of the physical space but also in terms of the techniques, the aesthetics determining food plating, and the style of service. At the same time, other places—and even the same ones—are working from the perspective of highlighting, protecting or giving more visibility to culinary local traditions and manners associated with food and cuisine. This dynamic can arise partly from a historic tension between foreign paradigms and an autochthonous past and therefore a possible dislocation between the past and the present (Massey 1995) – especially if one considers the past as that which personifies the true character of a place-. The problem becomes more complicated when having in mind the mixed character of locations with strong colonialist experiences, where the discourses of what is native has for centuries been a subject of enormous political and cultural difficulties and the source of constant social anxiety (Povinelli 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997).
A possible exoticization of traditional cuisines and auto-exoticization of cooks and consumers of the country’s culinary capital make traditions potential objects of consumption. When traditional flavors are exoticized, there seems to be a reproduction or reconstruction that mummifies and in fact downplays the main actors of these cuisines, each of the people who work around them and those that consume them. Not because any of them should have special prominence – this anonymity is part of the charm of the daily and the authentic – but because the
28 One of the “trickiest contradictions” that key actors of the production of organic food (such as Whole Foods) face,
Pollan says, is to reconcile the industrial production of organic food with the “pastoral ideas” that they promote and on which they have been built (Pollan 2006: 138).
culinary experience of all these people (individual and collective) seems to be the spirit of the knowledge we call traditional and its raison d’être.
On the other hand, tradition is in some way shielded precisely because of being traditional. Culinary knowledge that does not resist acts of evocation would appear to indicate that, either new generations would not know how to use it in a harmonious way with local customs, or techniques and uses associated with it are no longer useful for current needs. Without a doubt, to the extent as they are live practices, traditions are up to a certain point resistant to change. The question is how much space is being provided for them to remain alive in a process such as the one Colombia is going through now; a process that illustrates and materializes some of the complexities entailed in the intention of updating or revitalizing traditional knowledge.