GASTRONOMY: A novel social representation of foods through consumers? language

ROJAS-RIVAS, EDGAR; CUFFIA, FACUNDO

Future Foods. Global Trends, Opportunities, and Sustainability Challenges

Academic Press | Elsevier

Año: 2022; p. 411 - 424

Evolution of human beings and their relationship with food has gone from scarcity to overabundance due to several factors, mainly those of a technological and socio-economic nature. For its part, the human being is also the only species in the world that prepares its food based on social norms, fashions, beliefs, or customs (Bolan?os, 2009). In addition, the multipleways of preparing food within a society, along with traditions or beliefs related to it, reflect the traditional gastronomy of a specific place or territory (Guerrero et al., 2010).Gastronomy is a fundamental concept for describing a social representation of foods through the consumer?s language and for explaining the cultural and feeding characteristics of a society (Cuffia et al., 2021). However, although it is widely used, this is not clearly defined. Several definitions have been established from the language of experts in the gastronomic field, leaving aside one of the most important dimensions: the opinions, perceptions, or cognitive structures that consumers possess in different cultural contexts of the world (Rojas-Rivas et al., 2020, 2021). Furthermore, owed to the global importance, gastronomy has currently acquired today and the interest of chefs, artists, academics, and scientists in this discipline, new concepts have emerged in this field (Fooladi et al., 2019). As an example, one can mention the application of science in cooking, normally called ?molecular gastronomy? (Barham et al., 2010); or the foray into the neuroscience area to understand why food has a certain flavor, usually called ?neurogastronomy? (Fooladi et al., 2019; Shepherd, 2012; Spence, 2016); or ?gastrophysics? (Spence, 2018). These have approached the experience of human food from the areas of psychology and sensory analysis. However, recently, new studies expose the diversity of dimensions that are needed to define gastronomy through the study of its social representations. In fact, it has been shown that this concept consists of dimensions related to ?Culture?, ?Food and beverages (F&B)?, ?Hedonism,? ?Sensory aspects,? ?Ingredients, methods, and techniques,? among others (Rojas-Rivas et al., 2021).In the field of tourism, gastronomy has become an element of interest for the movement of people to a destination. Some studies highlight the importance of identifying profiles and types of tourists to detect the motivations that exist to carry out gastronomic or culinary tourism activities (P erez et al., 2020); the importance of food service in its development (Bertan, 2020); the role of traditional and local food (Sanchez-Can?izares and Castillo-Canalejo, 2015) or gastronomic festivals (Lo´pez-Guzma´n et al., 2017). For this reason, understanding social representations towards gastronomy from the language of consumers will be useful for gastronomic tourism literature, as well as for public entities in charge of promoting gastronomic-based tourist destinations, contributing to the development of regional or local economies.In this book chapter, we present a novel concept of gastronomy based on the empirical data from a cross-cultural study conducted among consumers from Mexico and Argentina (Rojas-Rivas et al., 2021). We use previous information to understand the concept of gastronomy in a global way from the language of consumers belonging to two Latin American territories with marked cultural differences. In addition, we present information on the study of gastronomy at a theoretical methodological level, including the structural approach of the theory of social representations (TSR), which may be of interest for future research in the gastronomic field to understand eating behaviors.To begin with, we describe some definitions of gastronomy. Subsequently, we introduce the reader to the ?Theory of Social Representations? and the theoretical-methodological implications of its use, along with the ?Central Core Theory,? which is fundamental to understand the social representations towards a concept. Finally, we present the results of thecross-cultural case study carried out in a global way and give a series of implications for the future on the importance of gastronomy and food, as well as future research opportunities in the field.