In Lisbon, Portugal, the World Congress of Rural Sociology is currently on. It is a stimulating week with researchers from all over the world in plenary sessions as well as smaller parallel groups where results and concepts are presented and discussed. While listening to some presentations, I had to think of the book “Food Movements Unite!” edited by Eric Holt-Giménez. Leaders of the food sovereignty movement talk about the future of the movement and about the need to unite. From the academic work currently presented, there seems to be hopeful news that this is happening. Patricia Allen explained how there is “basket of social movements in convergence” around food and agriculture in the US currently. Whereas the Sustainable Agriculture coalition would talk about environmental degradation and profitability of farm enterprises and certainly not about food security and social justice in a wider sense, this move is now being made. This makes linkages possible with the Community Food Security Movement. To describe this development, Patricia used the metaphor of a tree trunk with a non-negotiable core and branches with leaves of slightly different colour. Continue reading
Author Archives: Petra Derkzen
Tasteful waste
Earlier this month, we had a fun food culture class on the topic of waste and edibility. The writing of Mary Douglas on Purity and Danger was useful in order to think about how the definition of ‘waste’ is in fact a social construction which depends on social relations and thus varies from context to context. We looked at the various stages in the cycle from production to consumption where ‘waste’ is created by some, but sometimes turned into food by others. Waste, or ‘dirt’ in the words of Mary Douglas, is ‘matter out of place’. For a thing to become out of place, there needs to be an order with normalities such as, when a food is beyond its expiration date in a supermarket it will be thrown away. Anomaly then is all that does not fit the order (or who order differently). Examples are gleaning practices on agricultural fields, food collection for food banks and dumpster diving in retail waste.
Hidden qualities of bean sprouts
What do oysters, chocolate, caviar, figs and champagne have in common? They are among the most famous food aphrodisiacs. From a Western (historical) perspective though. There are completely other aphrodisiacs. Be careful with bean sprouts for example. While sharing food and stories in the Food Culture class, we learnt it can bring you sons… Continue reading
Kapsalon-City?
Last week, colleagues Erik Bakker and Anima Ruissen from the LEI in the Hague gave a guest lecture in the Food Culture Course on ethnic entrepreneurship. Food culture is often a resource at the disposal of immigrants on which they can build food entrepreneurship. There are often low barriers of entrance towards starting an ethnic restaurant where ‘authentic’ foreign dishes can be sold.
Cola-chicken and slaughtherhouse meat
In this 6th period of the academic year, I run a second course on Food Culture with similar topics as the course in February but with other teaching methods. The group is smaller, the period is longer and we can thus engage with the literature in a different way. One of the assignments in the course is the Food Assignment, where we have twice a lunch together based on brought food by half of the student group. A few weeks ago we had the first lunch and I was surprised how interesting it turned out in terms of food culture in practice.
source:travelpod blog
One of the Chinese students came with a dish he claimed as common and even widespread made in China, which has also very strong regional cuisines. He presented chicken cooked in cola. Lots of us present were first unclear if he really meant, cola, the soft drink. Indeed, this is what he meant and we could clearly taste the cola in the chicken meat. When searching the internet I found numerous examples of chicken-cola recipes, such as this one.
Our ignorance and thus astonishment about this dish, just turned into the next astonishment when the type of meat was discussed. This student used chicken drumsticks whereas he actually needed chicken wings. But he hadn’t been able to find these in the supermarket. The Vietnamese student replied that she always bought meat at the nearby slaughterhouse. Again, eyes widened, especially among the Dutch students. Was she referring to the butcher or indeed meaning the slaughterhouse? After asserting there was no Babylonian confusion of tongues, we were curious as to where then, this slaughterhouse is located. It turned out to be a small slaughterhouse in Opheusden within 15 kilometers from Wageningen, where it was possible to buy specific qualities and cuts of meat if sufficient quantity was bought. Hence, the Vietnamese students organise a collective order every now and then. I had no idea.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 