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Why food matters? - Eating and Culinary Nationalism

 

 

Unlike folklores and museum items, food is seemingly much trivial, as a source of nutrition in everyday life. Yet, it is important to note its role in the formation of cultural identity. As Tim Edensor argues

 

Identity formations does not necessarily formed through a reflexive, self-conscious identification, but can stemmed from feels of things and embodied sensual experience......fundamental emotional subjectivity should be the main part of one’s national identity.

 

Tim Edensor <National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life>

 

Specifically, the presence of objects or commodities provide material proof of shared ways of living and common habits, and these collective conventions are then developed to determine what items are worth displaying as “our ways of doing things” (Edensor 104, 105).

 

 

 

 

 

 

As in our daily life, people define cuisines by countries while food is usually a part of racial/national stereotypes, food is undoubtedly a commodity serves the function of “we-they distinction”, defining ethnic boundaries and shaping one’s sense of cultural identity (Surak 7).

 

KORE3022 Korean Studies Reserach Project

The University of Hong Kong

 

From “Paocai” to “Xinqi” – The Role of Kimchi in Korean Culinary Nationalism

 

 

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