Leftovers To Take Away: Summary and Conclusions

Food is an artifact, like amny others employed by humans, that created with thought and skill, and shaped through aesthetic principles, and that references existing knowledge to serve current expectations.

• The eating of new foods does not extinguish culture- people will eat their own home cuisines and sample others that are available
• Food will be organized and classified, given values and meanings that reference tradition, nutrition, and personal preferences.
• Ingredients and flavors are made sense of in the place of consumptionby members of different ethnic groups 
• women tend to cook at home and men in public
• Cuisine is a guide to identify the similarities in eating across cultures, and to explore the settlement and mobility of ingredients, flavors , and dishes, combined with the movement of people carrying culinary and gastronomic knowledge across the world
• Cuisine is everything we have, think, and do with food.

TAKE AWAY CUISINE

• cuisine is learned
• food tastes and individual preferences are the first site of enculturation and socialization
• Feeding children transforms a culture's complex classification of food, its values and meanings, into sensations and memories of food, embodying a cuisine within a physical person
• once codified in cookbooks and recipes, it takes on a more fixed form than in oral traditions
• written form has a life of its own and can travel and be learned by people in other cultures in other parts of the world
• creates disputes about the authenticity of the LIVED CUISINE versus the WRITTEN CUISINE
• Shared
• allows people to inhabit shared shared cultural and social existence
• a way to communicate commen experience
• embodies nationalist sentiments
• Symbolic
• a cuisine materializes the social order and people's place within it
• communicates complex meanings
• the choice of ingredients is packed with meaning
• the communicative quality of cuisine is divorced from its other wider interrelationships with all other aspects of people's lives. 
• production, exchange, kinship, politics, religion, social organization, and ideology
• The processes of culture change shape food traditions
• diffusion
• enculturation
• invention
• innovation
• creolization
• emulation
• assimilation
• globalization has increaed the rate and degree of change

TAKEAWAY LEFTOVERS

• Four themes about food and public discourse
• nutritional discourse
• fostered a greater awareness of the fundamental composition of food and its effect on the body
• new discourse trying to combat NCDs
• does not address the social meaning of food
• medical specialists have replaced traditional religious authorites in classifying foods
• sustainability of production (environmentally and socially)discourse
• shift in our relationship with food -greater distance between consumers and producers
• compromised the environment
• initiated a global discourse on climate change
• has us look at our basic relationship with the natural world
• led to a return to local, sustainable, and ethical food provision within the global system
• looks to workers rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions
• state of culinary knowledge discourse
• concerns cooking techniques, equipment, and the transmission of knowledge from home cooks across generations, to specialist chefs with apprentices, all learning how to make edible, healthy dishes.
• shapes the cuisine of home cooking
• sees cooking as rehabilitated as a pleasurable activity
• the Food Network, etc. popularity
• gastronomic talk of taste and distinction discourse
• shaped by ideas of culinary taste as a marker of social distinction and status
• the food we eat defines us-it is about our sense of identity
• talking about eating crosses all cultures
• provokes awareness of food as a vehicle for the practice of social and cultural life.

IN SHORT- CULTURALLY SPEAKING: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT