Anthropology of Food

In projects developed in the area of food history and in the different symposia organised by ICREFH in the past 30 years, the history of the senses has remained in the background. However, the senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste are appealed to when we deal with the production of foods for consumption. The use of the senses, which is quotidian, but equally ephemeral, seems to be outside of the written scholarship produced by historians. The creation, by elites, of taste, of fashion, of " bon gout " , are familiar areas of discussion today. This symposium, which will be presented for the 30th anniversary of ICREFH, proposes moving forward in our analysis of this area by drawing on recent research. Each sense can be a separate topic of historical research. However, separating each sense activated by food presents a somewhat impoverished image. In fact, all the senses are at work when we are eating. Thus, let us take them as a whole so as to seize a " balance of the senses " (Corbin), a rapport among them which can appear in the form of a hierarchy or of a balance. This ensemble is produced, it grows, it transforms, and then it sometimes disappears. Actually, the enhancement of taste indicates a constructed and deliberate hierarchical organization. In the same way, a crunch activates our sense of hearing initially, with the other senses staying in the background. All of this remains to be explored in order to evaluate and historicise the place accorded to the senses vis-à-vis food by 19th and 20th century society. We shall approach the history of food and the senses by means of an event, a product, a particular source (a family journal, a cookery book...), prohibitions, speeches… On the basis of already familiar archives or by utilising lesser known sources is it possible to generate new avenues of research or to reinterpret previous research? Three main themes have been adopted, but the organizing committee is open to other proposals: 1 – An analysis of the hierarchy of the senses in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their transformations: these can be produced in various ways: • By vocabulary: In this time period how was specific vocabulary constructed (e.g., for wine), how were words for food and the senses created? Some words disappear or change their meaning. • Can we observe geographical food distinctions that arose from the senses? Did the combination of the senses and food play a part in the creation of nations or of nationalism (national dishes and the senses that are particularly connected to them). Can we distinguish between the senses developed at home, and those developed outside of the home? Do there exist places of intensity for the senses (the kitchen, for example)? Seasons? • Is the appeal of the senses a function of social group, stages in life, type, body type (fat or thin, small or large, healthy?). The analogy between body odours or social position and certain dishes and their odours should perhaps be explored: foot odour/ cheese; poverty/cabbage smell; wealth/gameyness. • The industrialization of the senses: a new hierarchy? 2 – Production and construction of norms Are there rules, and how are they applied when it is a question of combining colours, forms, tastes, and odours? We can envisage the roles of regulations, European or national, of specific trades (doctors, cooks…), hygiene and the senses, the media: the press, radio, books, religion…

כשבחוץ השתולל הווירוס, במרחב הביתי התפשטה המחמצת כמגיפה עולמית. האם השמרים עזרו לנו לשמור על שפיות זמנית? עם החזרה לשגרה, החוקרים מנסים להבין מדוע התמכרנו לאפיית לחם
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Paella (a rice dish garnished with vegetables and sometimes various meats, fishes or shellfishes) appears very likely in the early nineteenth-century in the Valencia area. In this area, paella becomes precociously the basis of strong local identification processes. Paella appears in Spanish cookbooks as a regional recipe since the end of the nineteenth-century. However, the diffusion of the paella occurs lately in certain provinces. Paella, as Spanish national culinary symbol, is therefore built on cultural cross-purposes. For the foreigners, the paella is a Spanish monument that they have to visit with their fork and that they can find it on postcards; for the inhabitants of certain parts of Spain, the paella is a dish they know, but it is certainly not a national dish. Out of Spain, paella participates in the building of identities in various European or Colonial contexts. Classically, men, in the countryside, make paella far away from the (feminine) kitchen. Cooking paella outside between men is still honoured in certain regions, but the groups who prepare this dish can also be mixed and the making of paella in some communities is totally integrated in the woman domestic cookery. Commensality stays very important in the consumption of paella, even if individualised ways of eating it appear with its introduction in the fast food's system. Nowadays, in some situations, the paella is creolized, by the incorporation of few local ingredients, but in others, this dish conserves a classical aspect. Paella is both an international and a regional dish, which is strongly associated with local identities. It is a "chameleon dish": a preparation which have a strong power of adaptation and which takes the cultural colours of numerous places in the world.

Une étude ethnologique de la paella dans la région de Valence et ailleurs: usages et représentations d'un plat méditerranéen.

La paella est réellement ‘bonne à penser’ d'un point de vue ethnologique. Dans la région de Valence, où elle est née, c'est un plat aux usages précis et elle intervient dans la construction de l'identité locale. Mais qu'en est-il hors de cette aire première? La paella devient un plat emblématique de l'ensemble de l'Espagne, au terme d'un processus historique complexe, dans lequel interviennent notamment la diffusion internationale de certaines de ses recettes et le développement touristique du pays. La paella s'est aussi implantée dans certaines régions plus ou moins éloignées de la péninsule ibérique (Sud de la France; colonies). Aujourd'hui la paella joue un rôle dans d'autres cuisines occidentales, en raison de la mode pour l'alimentation méditerranéenne: elle apparaît saine et conviviale. La paella participe également aux formes les plus complexes de la cuisine globalisée.

Anthropological concerns with food and nutrition have increased greatly in the last four decades, and the development has been across the subdisciplines of anthropology and in conjunction with other academic disciplines. The current commission of the IUAES, the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF), initiated in 1977 by Mary Douglas and Ravindra Khare, has played a significant role in this increase, especially in Europe. The present Commissioner of ICAF is Igor de Garine ([email protected]) and the General Secretary is Annie Hubert ([email protected]). For further information on officers see ICAF’s website, www.icafood.eu. Although food and nutrition correspond to a primary human need, anthropologists rarely focused on aspects of food until the 1930s. Collaboration between anthropologists and nutritionists was first achieved by Richards and Widdowson (1936), and was developed further in the British Colonial Office and in the Organisation de Recherche sur l’Alimentation et la Nutrition Africaines (ORANA). Interest in anthropological perspectives on food grew during the Second World War and the post-war conditions (Guthe and Mead 1945) and among members of the culture and personality school (Kardiner et al. 1945). In the area of applied nutrition, information from anthropologists was sought and this brought an anthropological contribution to the understanding of food scarcity and malnutrition. Agencies of the United Nations, such as the International Children’s Centre, WHO and FAO included anthropological perspectives in their programmes on food and nutrition, and in 1966 a Food Habits Section was created within the FAO. In 1964, the International Biological Programme (IBP) included food and nutrition as a component in its Human Adaptability Section, allowing collaboration at a worldwide level between specialists from the biological and sociocultural sciences, including anthropologists. Meanwhile, Rappaport (1968) and Lee (1979) created a distinction between their ‘human ecology’ and the ‘cultural ecology’ of anthropologists, such as Steward, and Harris and Ross (1987) could be described as ‘cultural materialists’, all bringing food into their analyses. Following Levi-Strauss (1965), members of the structuralist school focused on the subject matter of food from yet a different perspective. Within the IUAES, the first relevant working group was on food symbolism in 1960, at the Sixth ICAES, and in 1968, at the Eighth ICAES, the International Committee for the Anthropology of Food and Food Habits was set up. This led to the inauguration of ICAF. The aims of ICAF are to: • assist anthropologists worldwide in basic and applied research on food; • encourage collaboration between biological and social anthropologists, and between these and institutions and individual experts from related fields of study; • stimulate education and training, scientific meetings and publications on the anthropology of food and nutrition; • promote indigenous expertise in less developed countries in regard to food problems and nutrition. Co-written by Igor de Garine, Helen Macbeth, Ricardo Avila, Frederic Duhart, Valerie de Garine, Isabel González Turmo, Claude Marcel Hladik, Annie Hubert, F. Xavier Medina, Ellen Messer, Patrick Pasquet, Wulf Schiefenhővel, Carmen Strungaru.

Guest Editors:

Véronique Saint-Ges, INRA, UMR SADAPT, France
Corinne Tanguy, CESAER AgroSup Dijon, France
Delphine Thivet, Centre Emile Durkheim (UMR 5116), Université de Bordeaux, France
Fragiskos Gaitis, Department of Food Analytical and Research laboratories of Athens at Hellenic Food Authority (EFET), Greece
Georgia Ouzounidou, Directorate of Research and Technological Development Activities, ELGO DEMETER, Greece

The agricultural and agri-food sector are currently confronted with many challenges influencing all the stakeholders of the value chain (Galliano, Raynaud, 2015): consumers, citizens, firms, farmers and policymakers behaviour. This follows various societal and food crises in recent years, as well as an increasing awareness of environmental issues. This in turn involves public health issues, social issues, economic issues, international issues calling for a transformation towards agri-food systems that are ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable. This evolution takes place in a context where, on the one hand, consumers are more and more demanding in terms of quality, safety, traceability, sustainability of products (Murdoch, Marsden and Banks 2000; Trobe 2001; Dubuisson-Quellier 2009), but at the same time in terms of prices (Aschemann‐Witzel and Zielke 2017); on the other hand, highly specialized farms and food firms actively seek to enhance their market competitiveness and profitability (Capitanio, Coppola and Pascucci 2009). As a consequence, the agri-food sector has to deal with often contradictory requirements and has to innovate to square that circle. This raises a central question regarding the extent to which and in what ways the process of innovation itself has to change so as to reorganize and redefine the agri-food system as a whole  (Bock 2012).
While the need to change the conventional agri-food systems is becoming nearly unanimous, the modification of existing practices and the introduction of new farming systems (urban farming for example), new forms of consumption (Seyfang 2006) and distribution, are disrupting the existing productive patterns and thus are often blocked. The unlocking of socio-technical systems aiming at pesticide reduction, for example, shows the importance of the processes of coordination of actors throughout the supply chains, the role of changes in advisory practices but also in logistics or marketing (Meynard et al., 2013; Picard, Tanguy, 2016). It also suggests the need to consider innovation as an interactive system rather than a linear process. Furthermore, it is important that an approach, taking into account that these changes might have an impact on food safety, is followed in order to predict the increased likelihood of the occurrence of safety incidents, so as to be better prepared to prevent, mitigate and manage associated risks (Gaitis and Ouzounidou, 2017)

This special issue has the following objectives:
1. To identify the various agri-food system actors from production to consumption: firms, farms, new stakeholders like urban consumers, governments, and civil society organizations, involved in innovative activities and in transforming the agri-food sector;
2. To provide a full overview of the innovative activities and different types of innovations, technological, organizational, social, institutional and policy innovations, at play in the transformation of agri-food system, including the development of new agricultural and agri-food practices (low-tech or high-tech), quality certification schemes, new distribution channels, new processes and the development of a circular economy;
3. To offer a better understanding of the interactions between technological innovations and other forms of innovations in transforming the agri-food sector: how diverse type of innovations can foster positive synergies among themselves? What are the major factors fostering these synergies among innovations and leading to wider transitions?
4. To understand and identify how actors (public and private organizations, financial organizations, researchers and trainers) can respond to the major challenges posed by innovations in the agri-food system in terms of regulation and supportive norms: implementation of cooperative projects, training, funding, etc.
5. To implement measures to better understand and limit the risks and environmental impacts, to better respond to changing conditions and exploit opportunities for new ways of production and consumption, including the prevention, rapid detection and effective addressing of emerging risks for food safety and quality.

How sustainability-orientedinnovations can encourage actors to rethink their organizations and develop cross-sectors collaboration and experimentation? How to sustain and finance innovations and new modes of food production and distribution? How can we develop a multidimensional approach necessary for the implementation of these types of innovations? Exploring these different issues, from market-based technological innovations to civil-society-based social innovations, aims to shed light on the currentfood innovation dynamics towards quality, safety and sustainability.

Papers may address several kinds of issues, such as:
- Local and sustainable modes of production and distribution (short supply chains such as Community Supported Agriculture, local farmers’ markets, basket delivery systems, urban agriculture)
- Global value chains versus local value chains in the agri-food sector
- Agro-food supply chains and territorial development
- Agro-innovation in digital times
- Climate change, agro-innovation and food quality
- Sustainable innovation and corporate social responsibility
- Consumer food trends and food safety challenges
- Citizen’s involvement and grassroots social innovations (local food networks,
cooperatives, Participatory Guarantee Systems...)
- Emerging food safety threats
- Health and nutritional claims in food labelling: a puzzle game
- Food Fraud
- Food security: Contributions of a sustainable bioeconomy

1st October 2019 : Deadline for complete manuscripts through online paper submission: http://www.editorialmanager.com/innovations/default.aspx