At the IP in Romania (see two earlier blogs) students study various aspects related to traditional foods, from discussions over micro-organisms and hygiene rules to marketing and rural development. The category ‘traditional’ is a social construction, what is considered traditional changes with time and cultural context. Tradition is influenced by new techniques and innovations; which one is allowed and which one is not? But also by current food cultures and the customer base to which traditional foods appeal. Traditional foods often carry one or more labels to protect these products against imitation. This is necessary as customers are usually cultural outsiders, urban consumers, tourists or consumers in other countries. Without a cultural reference point, they can’t judge on their own whether the product is traditionally produced and thus as authentic as claimed. Continue reading
Category Archives: Education
Traditional foods at IP in Romania (2)
At the Intensive Program for two weeks in Cluj-Napoca, students from France, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands study the relationship between traditional foods and micro organisms. Next week, they will receive lectures in micro-biology and they will go on a study trip to the mountains to learn about Slow Food in Romania. This week, they study traditional foods from a social science point of view, with lectures from sociologists and economists. Some of these lectures deal with how to market traditional foods, which are credence foods. Adding the category ‘traditional’ adds value/credence to the food, similar to the category ‘organic’ or ‘healthy’. An apple is not just an apple anymore but an órganic apple, which brings a world of associations and symbolic connections to the product. Once a credence food, it is vulnerable to cheating practices, how to distinguish the ‘real’ traditional food from its wannabee imitations? (see short BBC item on camenbert) Continue reading
Traditional foods at IP in Romania
Two weeks of Intensive Program are currently in progress in Cluj-Napoca, in the North West of Romania. Coming from 7 different countries, 42 students are learning about Traditional foods in relation to micro organisms. The course is international and interdisciplinary, this week they first had lectures in Sensory Analysis from colleagues of France, Belgium and Denmark and yesterday they started with the social science part in which I gave the first lecture on Food Culture & Authenticity.
We started the week on Monday with student presentations of Traditional Foods from their countries which we closed with a tasting session on the many products they brought. I used many of their examples in my lecture yesterday. For example, not one of the products presented was related to the ‘breakthrough’ of new preservation techniques (such as freezing) which developed simultanously with industrialisation. Of course, but without realising I found out, everybody had chosen products that had ‘old’ preservation techniques such as salting, smoking and fermenting.
A product such as sour cabbage was presented as typical for Romania but disputed by other students, for sauerkraut – zuurkool is a typical winterfood in many Eastern and Northern European countries. Cabbage, Pork, Cheese, Fruits such as plums, Walnuts were among the main ingredients of many traditional foods presented. Traditional because these products are rooted in rural self-subsistance household preservation. Pork, for example, is the pride of Romania. One of the traditional foods presented by a Romanian student group was the Ignat on the 20th of December. On this day, families in rural areas gather together and sacrifice the pig they have kept for this reason. It is a big ritual with particular techniques involved and roles to play for different members of the household. More than once, I heard the ‘joke’ that pork is the vegetable for Romanians.
Living the peasant way of life in Santa Cruz de la Colina
After a longer posting-pause in which I finalized my first research phase, identifying supporters of rural grassroots development initiatives in the Province of Soto, here a new update of my activities in Colombia:
Time is flying and I am finalizing my second research phase, asking grassroots development initiatives to evaluate the support they are receiving to build joint capacities. To be able to speak with rural development initiatives, I was invited to spend a week with a peasant family in the vereda St. Ana of Santa Cruz de la Colina.
Santa Cruz de la Colina, Matanza, Colombia
Politics of place making in urban farming – an essay
By Anke de Vrieze
Last trimester, I had the opportunity to join the Capita Selecta course `A Global Sense of Place´, taught by Joost Jongerden and Dirk Roep. From my current working experience in the field of urban agriculture, the subject of the course – place-based approaches for sustainable development- interested me and proved valuable. In the course, different approaches to ‘place’ were discussed and related to culture, politics, economics and leadership. As we were a small group of students, we met in a weekly reading group, to discuss the literature and our written assignments.
Personally, I was most inspired by the work of Doreen Massey. Her perspective on place and space is a relational one, as she describes places as ‘temporary constellations’ or ‘bundles of space-time trajectories’. In one of her articles, she connects this relational perspective to ‘geographies of responsibility’ and shows how the ‘global’ is embedded locally as well. Taking the example of the City of London, i.e. it’s financial district, she argues against generalised understandings of the local as a product of the global, and demonstrates that indeed much of what we call ‘the global’ stems from local areas, such as the City of London. This leads her to plea for alternative globalisations, based on ‘a challenge of place’. I think, Massey’s perspective can prove meaningful for anyone studying ‘place’, whether it be in urban or rural settings.
For the final essay, ‘Growing community? Urban agriculture in the context of place-based urban development’ of the course, I discussed the ‘politics of place-making’ in a case of urban farming. By drawing on the example of an neighbourhood-based urban agriculture project, I showed how the different perspectives on place, as employed by various actors involved, creates a dynamic fields of interests regarding the ability of UA to address urban issues, and to achieve sustainable community development. Based on this short analysis, I argued for the need of a relational perspective on place, taking into account place-frames and positionality of actors, in (future) cases of neighbourhood-based urban farming.
Anke de Vrieze, anthropologist and project coordinator of FARMING THE CITY (www.farmingthecity.net), contact: ftc@citiesthemagazine.com
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 