Urban Foodways and Communication: Ethnographic Studies in Intangible Cultural Food Heritages Around the World(Bloomsbury Studies in Food and Gastronomy)

Embedded in the quest for ways to preserve and promote heritage of any kind and, in particular, food heritage, is an appreciation or a sense of an impending loss of a particular way of life – knowledge, skills set, traditions -- deemed vital to the survival of a culture or community. Foodways places the production, procurement, preparation and sharing or consumption of food at an intersection among culture, tradition, and history. Thus, foodways is an important material and symbolic marker of identity, race and ethnicity, gender, class, ideology and social relations. Urban Foodways and Communication seeks to enrich our understanding of unique foodways in urban settings around the world as forms of intangible cultural heritage. Each ethnographic case study focuses its analysis on how the featured foodways manifests itself symbolically through and in communication. The book helps advance our knowledge of urban food heritages in order to contribute to their appreciation, preservation, and promotion.

Table of Contents:
1: At the Intersection of Urban Foodways, Communication, and Intangible Cultural Heritage: An Introduction Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer 2: Bacalhau–A Love Story: An Ethnographic Study of Portuguese Foodways paula arvela 3: Kimchi Nation: Constructing Kimjang as an Intangible Korean Heritage Chi-Hoon Kim 4: The Lebanese Bigarade: A Tree at the Heart of Urban Foodways Aïda Kanafani-Zahar 5: Shark Town: Kesennuma’s Taste for Shark and the Challenge of a Tsunami Jun Akamine 6: The Story in My Matzah Ball Soup: Food as Memory, Identity, and Culture in Contemporary Jewish Barcelona Catherine Simone Gallin 7: Gastronomic Festivals and Celebrations on the Montenegrin Coast: Promoting Multicultural Heritage through Traditional Foodways Ivona Jovanovic´, Andiela Vitic-Cetkovic, and Charles A. Baker-Clark 8: FIFA vs. As Baianas de Acarajé and the Politics of the Cultural Imaginary Scott Alves Barton 9: Edible Heritage: Tradition, Health, and Ephemeral Consumption Spaces in Mexican Street Food José Antonio Vázquez-Medina, Miriam Bertrán, and F. Xavier Medina 10: Botteghe Storiche: A Study of the Disappearance of Historic Food Shops and Its Role in the Transformation of Rome’s Urban Social Life Sonia Massari, Elena T. Carbone, and Salem Paulos 11: Urban Melting Pot: Food Heritage in Yakutia Isabelle Bianquis and Isabella Borissova 12: Epilogue: Urban Foodways as Communication and as Intangible Cultural Heritage Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

About the Author :
Casey Man Kong Lum, PhD, is Professor of Communication, William Paterson University. A member on the Board of Directors of the Urban Communication Foundation, Casey is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in urban food cultures, media and culture, intercultural communication and diasporic studies. His book In Search of a Voice explores the role of karaoke singing in the social construction of identity. His authored/edited volume on The Media Ecology Tradition was the winner of the 2006 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics by the Media Ecology Association. He teaches graduate and undergraduate-level courses in media studies, food studies, and intercultural communication. Marc de Ferrière le Vayer, PhD, is Professor of Modern History at Université François Rabelais de Tours, France. A scholar in food heritage studies well-known around the world and an author of numerous publications, Marc is the Chair Holder of the UNESCO Chair in the Safeguarding and Promotion of Intangible Cultural Food Heritage at the University of Tours since 2011.

Review :
Lum, de Ferrière le Vayer, and their collaborating authors provide an exciting new perspective on foodways as dynamic forms of communication within and among contested urban spaces. Sophisticated yet accessible, diverse yet coherent, fresh but well grounded, this volume dives deep into the material, symbolic, and political complexities of food as cultural heritage. This book about culinary cultural heritage contains a wealth of original research from regions that have been under-represented in previous collections on culinary culture. The introductory essay provides an original synthetic conceptualization of culinary culture as communication and ties this to the context of the globalizing city. Overall this book is a significant and original contribution to the growing literature on urban foodways with a particular focus on the social mechanisms and politics of urban culinary heritage. This book identifies and explores issues crucial to understanding how food is being used today to represent identity and heritage. Using ethnographic studies from urban contexts around the world, it sheds light on the implications of recognizing food’s potential for such communication and offers a glimpse of the diversity of responses by actual communities and individuals to this attention to food. An excellent introduction to the ideas and challenges of approaching food as communicative medium and intangible heritage!