Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain , livre ebook

Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain
Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain
Rafael Climent-Espino and Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, editors
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
© 2020 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2020
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Climent-Espino, Rafael, 1977- editor. | Gómez-Bravo, Ana M. (Ana María), editor.
Title: Food, texts, and cultures in Latin America and Spain / Rafael Climent-Espino and Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, eds.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Approaches Hispanic and Latin American food from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Fourteen essays apply a food lens to colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics, nationalisms and nation building, theories of embodiment, and identity”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019031046 (print) | LCCN 2019031047 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826522818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826522825 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826522832 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Food in literature. | Cooking in literature. | Latin American literature—History and criticism. | Spanish literature—History and criticism. | Food habits—Latin America. | Food habits—Spain. | Cookbooks—Latin America—History. | Cookbooks—Spain—History.
Classification: LCC PN56.F59 F685 20194 (print) | LCC PN56.F59 (ebook) | DDC 641.30098—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031046
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031047
This study was supported in part by funds from the Vice Provost for Research at Baylor University .
CONTENTS
Introduction: Food Studies in Latin American and Spanish Contexts
1. Food, Blood, and a Jewish Raza in Fifteenth-Century Spain
ANA M. GÓMEZ-BRAVO
2. Taste and Taxonomy of Native Food in Hispanic America: 1492–1640
GREGORIO SALDARRIAGA ESCOBAR
3. Still Life, Food, and Fiction: Diversions from the Colonial Baroque
RODRIGO LABRIOLA
4. Furniture and Equipment in the Royal Kitchens of Early Modern Spain
CAROLYN A. NADEAU
5. Enlightened Meals: Literary Perspectives on Food in Eighteenth-Century Spain
MARÍA ÁNGELES PÉREZ SAMPER
6. Madrid: Cuisine as Cultural Melting Pot
MARÍA DEL CARMEN SIMÓN PALMER
7. Beyond the Recipes: Authorship, Text, and Context in Canonical Spanish Cookbooks
MARÍA PAZ MORENO
8. Cooks and Ladies: The Writing of Culinary Knowledge in Argentina in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
PAULA CALDO
9. The Evolution of Mexican Cuisine: Five Gastronomical Seasons, Mole , Pozole , Tamal , Tortilla , and Chile Relleno
ADOLFO CASTAÑÓN
10. What the Palate Knows: Nicaragua’s Culinary Cultures
SERGIO RAMÍREZ
11. A Gastrocritical Reading of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Early Narrative: Legends of Guatemala , The President , and Men of Maize
RAFAEL CLIMENT-ESPINO
12. On Hunger and Brazilian Literature
SABRINA SEDLMAYER
13. Food in Recent Cuban Literature (1990–2016): From Hero in the Special Period Fiction to Almost Zero in the Generation Zero
RITA DE MAESENEER
Index
INTRODUCTION
Food Studies in Latin American and Spanish Contexts
Ana M. Gómez-Bravo and Rafael Climent-Espino
A GROWING INTEREST IN food studies, particularly in relation to economic, environmental, political, and cultural issues, has translated into a large number of publications across a wide range of venues. From books such as Marion Nestle’s Food Politics or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma to the Slow Food movement, popular academic journals such as Gastronomica , Food and Foodways , and Food, Culture, and Society , and city-specific periodicals such as Edible Communities , food consumption choices are understood to have enormous impact on the environment, the socioeconomics of food access, and health and disease prevention. New scientific research on metabolic diseases (including state-of-the-art “omics” disciplines such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) and other types of medical research in key areas such as nutrient needs and deficiencies or eating disorders have helped bring food studies to the fore. At the same time, fiction, mass media, and social media have increasingly been preoccupied with what people eat, along with the social, political, and environmental context of food. The consistent popularity over the last twenty years of films such as What’s Cooking (2000) and Fuera de carta ( Chef’s Special ; 2008), documentaries like King Corn (2007) and The Meaning of Food (2004), and fiction like Josep Pla’s Lo que hemos comido (2013) and Cristina Campos’s Pan de limón con semillas de amapola (2018) shows that the centrality of food remains inescapable. 1 Food’s strong presence in social and visual media—for example, in the numerous iterations of Masterchef; food blogs like Gastro Andalusí (Jiménez) , El Comidista-El País (López Iturriaga), and México en mi cocina (Martínez); and Instagram posts—brings attention to the visual components of food commercialization, consumption, and sociability, prompting new concepts and terms like “foodography” or “food porn,” coined by Rosalind Coward. The need to combine cultural studies with those based on the biological sciences has been underscored in several collective volumes in the field of food studies, most recently from a historical approach by Jennifer J. Wallach and Michael Wise, from a literary standpoint by Rita De Maeseneer, 2 and from an interdisciplinary perspective in the studies collected by Montserrat Piera and Ángeles Mateo del Pino and María N. Pascual Soler, all of which correctly warn against trivializing a focus on food in academic humanities research.
From a curricular perspective, the rise of food studies programs in university structures and curricula clearly shows that food is a junction where diverse disciplines in the humanities, social and natural sciences, health and nutrition, and medicine can meet and begin productive dialogues and collaborations. The critical paths that lead from such intersections point to an exciting role for the humanities by creating a widening interest in interdisciplinary research and collaboration, for which scholars such as Warren Belasco have made a compelling case. As Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna L. Brien point out in the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food , university courses on food fill up quickly, posing a strong pedagogical platform from which to engage students across disciplines, as well as presenting the humanities in a synergistic way with other fields. The role of the humanities in food studies goes beyond the analysis of mimetic representation to become a critical player in the disciplinary intersectionality at the core of food studies. At a time when the disconnect between people and the soil has grown to reportedly unprecedented levels, the study of food, texts, and cultures can contribute valuable insights to food studies, and the humanities can make a significant impact, adding meaning, creating content, and engaging powerful analytical lenses. An exciting related development is the incorporation of food topics into the Spanish curriculum, an increasingly popular addition to Spanish courses made easier by the recent publication of textbooks on Hispanic food and culture geared toward students enrolled in secondary and higher-education Spanish classes (Gómez-Bravo, Comida ).
Anthropological approaches were among the first to produce important studies on food and culture and food history. Susan Bordo, Mary Douglas, Margaret Mead, Paul Rozin, and others opened exciting new vistas that placed food at the center of social, religious, ethnic, and literary practices. In The Raw and the Cooked , structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss used binary oppositions in sociocultural analysis, later drawing a culinary triangle that presented cooking as a language based on unconscious structures, borrowing elements of language analysis: “Thus we can hope to discover for each specific case how the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure—or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions” (“The Culinary Triangle” 595). Social anthropologist Mary Douglas highlighted the symbolic power of food prohibitions and their role in the creation of boundaries. From the standpoint of cultural materialism, Marvin Harris pinpointed the adaptive needs that weigh into food choice and religious food prohibitions. He viewed culture as influenced by the material conditions from which it arises and put forth a functionalist explanation for food-centered religious laws. In her chapter included in this volume, Ana M. Gómez-Bravo analyzes the combined efforts of medical theory, religious belief, and Church doctrine in channeling an understanding of food as racialized marker. In Distinction , Pierre Bourdieu approached food from the standpoint of class and developed the concepts of habitus , or acquired dispositions, and cultural capital, exploring their role in the formation of taste in reference to art, music, and gastronomy. Bourdieu’s sociological emphasis, as well as the important issues raised by anthropologists, would resonate with many scholars working from a variety of fields and looking to examine the implications of combined biological and cultural approaches to food studies.
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