Tastes of Homes: Exploring Food and Place in Twentieth-Century Europe

Abstract

Food and taste play an essential role in sentiments of belonging and exclusion, and in turn, these sentiments are central to defining one's home as a material or an imagined place. Taste refers to a gustatory sense that makes humans capable of differentiating flavors on the one hand and describes cultural preferences and eating patterns on the other. As a social construction, home can refer to a physical place imbued with domestic notions of privacy and family or be conceived of as a broader geographical place in terms of locality, region, or nation. Both taste and home emerge as subjective and relative concepts. This special issue analyzes their multidimensional and dynamic meanings and their interrelationship. The main question it addresses is how place contributes to tastes of homes. The five articles that make up this Food and Foodways issue explore this question based on a vast array of sources and within five European countries during the twentieth century, when the internationalization and industrialization of the food chain increasingly provoked feelings of displacement. This introductory article reviews the research already conducted on the notions of taste, home, and place, and introduces the individual contributions as well as the broader themes they develop.

Notes

¹This is not always true, as Mary Douglas talks of the “tyranny of the home” (Douglas).

²A search in The Food Bibliography proves this periodization: http://www.foodbibliography.eu/index_en.asp.

³See, for example, the special issue published by Anthropology of Food 7 (2010).

⁴The contemporary equivalence of the English word “house” with “home” seems to be “the linguistic waste product of the American real-estate industry” that, in the late nineteenth century, equated both terms in order to enhance the real estate value of houses and distinguish a home from a whore-house (Hollander 41).

⁵See the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History 40.2 (2005) on the meanings of home in postwar Europe introduced by Betts and Crowley.

⁶We refer here to the series A Cultural History of Food consisting of six volumes, each containing a chapter on food, family, and domesticity.