Local and International Trends in Hospitality and Gastronomy

partner of Richard Leakey (left) for two decades, turns up facial bones of a fossil Homo Erectus under a thorn tree on the western shore of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Photo by David L. Brill 1985, National Geographic Society, from The Leakey Foundation Archive

Preparing food as a symbol

The moral debate around food and its role in our culture might seem exaggerated today (e.g. the growing practices of bio, fair trade, organic, etc. food resources) but the way people prepared their and their guests food was always very important to understand the nature of a given society. For example using fire to prepare our food is so important that the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss based his famous ‘culinary triangle’ on the distinction of cooking, roasting and smoking food preparation techniques (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The culinary triangle of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Source: Lévi-Strauss (2008)

For Lévi-Strauss there is an important distinction between cooking and roasting. As he argues „the boiled can most often be ascribed as what might be called an ’endo- cuisine’, prepared for domestic use, destined to a small closed group, while the roasted belongs to the ’exo-cuisine’, that which one offers to guests”. According to Lévi- Strauss roasting the food retains it in the natural realm while using mediation (like water) and boil the food will bring the whole act and its result closer to culture. So, boiling is the perfect way to preserve the totality of the food as it takes place without the loss of substance. Boiling and smoking opposition is not only refers to food types oppositions but also refers to other cultural dichotomies such as life in the bush (roasting) and sedentary life (boiling), man (roasting) and woman (boiling), etc.

What is interesting for us here is the symbolism of food and cooking, especially the preparation of food for guests. In many cases the hosts’ goal is to maintain a social face through food. Food is therefore, according to many anthropologists, a major protagonist in the cultural contact zones. Food sharing,
food taboos, feasting, family meals, table manners are just some examples of these symbolic behaviours. As culture enabled humans to control food it was also our culture that helped to shape nature in order to produce our food. Because it is food wherein culture and nature meet.


Image 5. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Harvesters. This painting of Bruegel beautifully demonstrates the important relationship between work and food sharing