2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Food and Identity : Food Culture as a Means of National Integration in the Modern European Countries
| Project/Area Number |
15520467
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
History of Europe and America
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| Research Institution | Kyoto Tachibana University (2005)
Osaka International University (2003-2004) |
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Principal Investigator |
MINAMI Naoto Kyoto Tachibana University, Faculty of Literature, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (20181951)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2005
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| Keywords | Food culture / Diet history / National integration / Nation state / Cookbook / National identity / Food control system / Food sciences |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to investigate the fundamental problems of the modern European society, such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and integration of a nation state, from a new and unique viewpoint of food and through the materials on food history. Especially the investigator focuses on studying the process of integration of nation states from a topic of everyday life, food, and also tries to treat a wide range of problems on politics, economy and society. The materials of this research are several sources about diet, some contemporary documents such as cookbooks, and various secondary documents. And the investigator participated in the eighth and ninth international symposiums of the International Commission for Research into European Food History (ICREFH), which were held in 2003 in Prague and in 2005 in Berlin, and on those occasions he collected a lot of information about this subject from several leading food historians in Europe.
The subject of food cultu
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re is related with a wide range of the problems of human society and history. In this research, I discuss, at first, the general historical transition of food on the background of the industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth-century Europe and, particularly study the problem of food adulteration and the construction of regal and administrative control system of food distribution. Secondly, I consider the progress of the food sciences, such as dietetics and nutritional chemistry, as premise of construction of the food control system, and also observe an expansion of the "anti-modern" discourse about food in the late nineteenth century as reaction of such a remarkable progress of the food sciences. Thirdly, as a main subject, I treat the relationship between the formation of modern nation state and the food problem. I trace the process of making use of the dietetics and nutritional education as means of the integration of working class to a nation state, on levels of discourse and institution. And moreover, I examine that some cookbooks played an important roll in a formation of national identity in some small European countries such as Norway and Slovenia.
As a whole, it seems to be proved that the food culture was closely connected with the integration process on a level of nation states in Europe. Less
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