This edited collection explores the changes within the kitchen that lead to transformations in cooking practices and the taste and meanings of food. It challenges the assumption that isolated or rural societies do not experience changes in their cooking and eating habits by looking at daily life from an anthropological, archaeological and ethno-historical perspective. This book evaluates critically the extent to which traditional and modern culinary practices are maintained or negotiated. It fills a gap in food studies by looking closely at the use of technology and household organisation in daily food preparation. According to the editor, Steffan Ayora-Diaz, all the contributors look at the kitchen as a privileged space where the global, local and translocal converge, highlighting the importance of this space to culture and identity. This edited collection focuses on Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica and the United States. In this review I will make reference to only some of the chapters for the sake of space.
Lilia Fernández-Souza explores the symbolic component of culinary technology among the Mayas in Yucatan, Mexico, by looking at grinding and cooking tools like metates, molcajetes and pit ovens. She concludes that the use of these tools has changed, from being used on a daily basis to grind maize to being used on special occasions to produce particular dishes or to grind spices such as achiote. In any case, food and its ancestral technologies reinforce a sense of community, sociability and identity ties.
Julián López García and Lorenzo Mariano Juárez study the reach and limitations of technological change among the Mayas of eastern Guatemala. Making tortillas among the Mayas is central to homemaking. Women transform the corn with the help of a metate and a comal into food to nourish not only their family's bodies but also their souls. In addition, tortilla-making skills give pride to women and help them reproduce their culture. Therefore, an attack on the metate implies a criticism of the cultural value of the tortilla. Introducing any technological change such as mechanical corn mills or solar ovens requires working with the community to assess the dimension of cultural affectivity involved in the use and adoption of new gadgets. Otherwise, the authors conclude, promoters of change are in danger of reproducing neocolonial dynamics.
Claudia Rocío Magaña González investigates how indigenous cooks from a Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico, combine modern and traditional values, techniques and technologies to build, rethink and negotiate their ethnicity. This chapter reveals that modern appliances such as gas stoves and blenders have become more common mainly due to migration. Children working in urban areas in Mexico or in the United States tend to provide these appliances to facilitate women's daily cooking. However, not all women are welcoming of these new technologies. Although such objects are a symbol of prestige, cooking skills are a source of respect within the community. It takes years for women to learn how to cook using traditional techniques and materials such as firewood. Traditional cooks are concerned about the loss of this practice and, therefore, their knowledge.
Margarita Calleja Pinedo investigates the Americanisation of Mexican food through the study of cookbooks published in the United States which she uses to assess how Mexican food and ingredients are portrayed and used. She focuses on the introduction of chili peppers and chili con carne. Calleja Pinedo concludes that although Mexicans and Anglos coexisted in places like Texas, their food cultures remained separate due to social segregation. Cooking methods and dishes were not exchanged; however ingredients did cross cultural barriers. This was true of chili, which entered Anglo kitchens as a spice or condiment rather than as a fresh vegetable. Meanwhile chili con carne became popular after Willie Gebhart, a German immigrant, began canning it as a ready-to-serve main meat dish.
Anna Cristina Pertierra looks at kitchen technologies in Cuba arguing that it is in the kitchen space where Cubans have experienced most vividly the changes brought by the Cuban revolution. Moreover, it is through the use of apparently apolitical technologies like kitchen appliances that Cubans participate in the networks of consumption and distribution marked by communism. Pertierra focuses on the 2006 national policy known as the ‘Energy Revolution’ through which Cubans exchanged their old and inefficient electrical appliances for energy-efficient ones, sometimes at a subsidised price. The Energy Revolution proves that the Cuban government is still trying to retain the communitarian ideological basis of socialism and its concern with domestic consumption as a centre of emotional wellbeing and political participation.
Raúl Matta analyses food gentrification in Peru, which happens when a food item is removed from its context, thus neutralising its indigenous and lower-class features, and then associated with elements from globally recognised culinary cultures. He coins the term ‘Peruvian fusion’ to refer to the creations of renowned chefs, most of whom come from upper-class families and have trained abroad. According to Matta, this new trend in Peruvian food is the outcome of the tourism industry, which tries to promote positive exoticisms. Chefs use traditional indigenous ingredients and European cooking techniques to produce new dishes, which dissociates them from their cultural and social context.
Mona Nikolić examines Afro-Caribbean foodways in Costa Rica. She finds that Afro-Caribbean food is disappearing from daily life, although it has taken a prominent role in the tourist industry. Nikolić argues that, via their consumption by tourists, cooking techniques have been preserved and reintegrated in the local context. Through a study in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Nikolić observes that tourists' interest in Afro-Caribbean food has allowed community members to preserve their cooking techniques as a signal of embodied knowledge and authenticity, and also as a way of making a living.
Overall this edited collection reveals the importance of studying food to understand social and cultural change. It also highlights the role of technology and cooking techniques in transforming or preserving cultures and communities. In the Afterword Carole Counihan highlights the possible avenues of research opened by this collection, in which we need to keep in mind the effects of globalisation, industrialisation, immigration, and state institutions in our daily cooking and eating.
