Migration and Small Ventures. Cooking and Eating

ARBIDE, DARDO; CRIVOS, MARTA

Urbanization, Industrialization, Marketization and Cultural Diversity

Intellectual Publishing House

Lugar: Beijing; Año: 2015; p. 312 - 330

Nowadays the knowledge on food, derived from basic research and technological development, is vast. However, the investigation about the domestic practices of daily cooking and eating is not (Messer, 1995). This happens because the interest for eating, guided by the economy and the medical community, still ignores many aspects of a very complex phenomenon that represents the eating habits of a society. In this sense, we argue that knowledge of domestic routines is the key, since the meaning and effect of food is not created on the basis of its basic components but on its process of transformation and consumption. Getting to know the ways of obtaining food resources provides essential information about the socio-cultural dynamics underpinning culinary practices (Goody, 1995; Mennell, Murcott, and van Otterloo, 1994; Douglas and Isherwood, 1990). However, this domestic cooking and eating practice changes throughout time: it is dynamic and multiple factors are involved in this changing situation. We limit our observations to the effects that the change of residency of family groups has on cooking and eating in different contexts. Thus, in order to carry out this research, we chose three places where these changes of residency show different features: Molinos, Concepción del Uruguay and Berisso. In Molinos, the members of the informant families come from rural areas with a very low population density, where they still have relatives, members who periodically migrate to production centres and other family members who live in larger urban centres. In Concepción del Uruguay, our informants transitorily reside in the city and are still in contact with their families and home towns, where they regularly return. As regards Berisso, our informants are all descendants belonging to the third and fourth generation of European immigrants. In all three cases, their home towns are present in their daily cooking practices. It is the aim of our approach to establish links between the changes in cooking and eating practices and the movement of groups to other areas but that still have their families and home towns as a reference. The scope of these movements and their variations as regards the different environments and ecosystems these groups go through have some bearing on the type of family ties involved in food supplying and processing practices as well as on associated knowledge. Local small ventures are of great importance for the supplying of feeding goods, since they introduce different changes in eating habits when trying to fulfil the demands of specific goods. Methodologically speaking, the memory of experience (episodic memory) in its narrative expression constitutes a key resource in our effort to rebuild these trajectories.