Trajectories of taste: An analytical framework of culinary change after migration

Introduction

How and why do cuisines change after migration? The TASTE Project offers a novel approach to study the global spread of cooking techniques, products, dishes, recipes, food practices, and taste hierarchies. By focusing on three relatively old Indonesian diasporas (of Suriname, Sri Lanka, and South Africa), its researchers address the following hypotheses:

1. What people choose to eat is primarily driven by embodied notions of taste;
2. Food preferences are inherited and exchanged;
3. Culinary change significantly resembles linguistic change.

Research Gaps

Culinary change is yet to be analyzed comprehensively. While we know from earlier studies that flavor affects food preferences and that migration affects eating patterns, we lack an analytical language and integrated methodology to examine these phenomena systematically.

Methodological Approach

Drawing from the conceptual apparatus of historical linguistics and state-of-the-art fieldwork practices, this project develops a new methodological toolkit to identify with greater precision than before how cuisines evolve after migration, how different culinary traditions influence each other, and which different mechanisms propel these processes.

The team will collect and analyze recipes and food descriptions from three countries housing Indonesian diasporas, complemented by:

• Following-the-things approaches
• Narrative research
• “Gastrolinguistic” analysis
• Sensory elicitation

Work Packages

The project’s three work packages focus on the role of:

1. Contact-induced borrowing of culinary features (PhD-1)
2. Inherited notions of taste (PhD-2)
3. Economic dimensions of food preferences (PhD-3)

These subprojects use the same theoretical and methodological framework but focus on different categories: sweet desserts, food served during feasts, and “poverty food” respectively.

Implications

The resulting insights on culinary change hold a largely unacknowledged key to promoting more sustainable consumption patterns and mitigating the fast-increasing number of food-related problems worldwide.