UNESCO: Protecting Cultural Heritages Worldwide

Written by Sarah Faith

If you’ve ever been to France, then you know that a baguette from a boulangerie in Paris, Lyon, or Provence has an air of je ne sais quoi about it. More than four hundred years of practice – and a revolution – have gone into the making of the iconic French baguette. It is a staple food, a part of daily French life – morning, midday and in the evening. A veritable symbol of the country.

The traditional baguette is protected under a 1993 French law. To truly be considered a “traditional French baguette,” the bread must be made on the premises from which it is sold, it must be made with four ingredients only (wheat flour, water, yeast and salt), it cannot be frozen at any stage, and it cannot contain additives or preservatives. Making a traditional baguette requires more than the ability to follow a recipe. It requires practiced skill.

However, times are changing. Many French are no longer eating baguette three times a day as eating patterns change. Fewer bakeries are making baguettes in the traditional manner, often relying on frozen bread in an effort to cut costs.

Now, in an effort to protect the quality of and skill that goes into the making of the baguette, President Emmanuel Macron is supporting a bid by the National Confederation of French Bakers. Their goal is protection of the baguette as a “world treasure” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Established in 2008, the UNESCO Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage include oral traditions, social practices, performing arts, festive events, rituals, knowledge/practices concerning nature, and knowledge/skills to produce traditional crafts that are recognized by communities around the world as being representative of their cultural heritage. The items on the lists are passed down from generation to generation. They provide a sense of identity and community.

UNESCO has inscribed heritages from around the world, including Uilleann piping (Ireland), the Tahteeb stick game (Egypt), and the Yama, Hoko, and Yatai float festivals (Japan). These heritages help to nourish both cultural diversity and human creativity and, according to UNESCO, “can help to meet many contemporary challenges of sustainable development such as social cohesion, education, food security, health and sustainable management of natural resources.” In granting the list designation, UNESCO aims to ensure that intangible cultural heritages worldwide are better protected and awareness of them promoted.

As of this writing, there are 470 items corresponding to 117 countries on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage lists. And food plays a role, with a number of cultural foods, cuisines and practices represented. Curious to learn more, I dug a little deeper. Below you’ll find a snapshot of my food-related findings – one from each of the ten years that the lists have been in existence.

2008: Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead (Mexico)

2009: Oku-noto no Aenokoto (Japan)

2010: Gastronomic meal of the French

2011: Ceremonial Keşkek tradition (Turkey)

2012: Cherry festival in Sefrou (Morocco)

2013: Kimjang, making and sharing kimchi in the Republic of Korea

2014: Lavash, the preparation, meaning and appearance of traditional bread as an expression of culture in Armenia

2015: Arabic coffee, a symbol of generosity (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar)

2016: Beer Culture in Belgium

2017: The Art of Neapolitan ‘Pizzaiuolo’ (Italy)

As for whether the French baguette will be given the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation, we will have to wait and see. After the National Confederation of French Bakers submits its nomination, they must then wait for the annual meeting of the Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. During this meeting, the Committee will evaluate this and other nominations and decide whether or not to inscribe the French baguette to the lists for safeguarding.

For more information about the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage lists visit https://ich.unesco.org/.

Sarah Faith is a student in the Gastronomy program and marketing and communications professional specializing in food and agricultural at CONE in Boston.

Course Spotlight: Food & Visual Culture

Images, whether still or moving, are all around us and have become an increasing part of the modern landscape. The result of this proliferation of visual culture is that our understanding of the world is progressively mediated by images. So, not only have the products of visual media become more and more a part of our lives, but vision and seeing have become even more important to how we know and understand the world. But the visual does more than simply present the world to us, it can shape how we understand and relate to that world. Studying media, therefore, is a way for us to study ourselves and better understand our culture, our social and political values and our ideologies.

Within the past decade there has been a notable growth in food-related cultural activity on TV, in films, books and digital media (Twitter, websites, blogs, video games, etc.). Food has become, both figuratively and quite literally, more visible in our lives. But what is behind this increased focus on food? And, how has it affected people’s expectations around how food is produced and eaten? What affect, if any, has it had on the way we eat and cook?

The goal of this course is to examine depictions of food and cooking within visual culture and to analyze the ways in which they reflect and shape our understanding of the meaning of food. To this end, we will explore how food and cooking are depicted as expressions of culture, politics and group or personal identity via a multitude of visual materials, including, but not limited to: TV programs, magazines, cook books, food packaging, advertising, photography, online and digital media, and works of art.

A good portion of class time will be given to discussing the readings in combination with participatory, in-depth analysis of the visual material. The class will also take a field trip to a food photography studio as well as a culinary tour of Boston’s Chinatown.

MET ML 671, Food and Visual Culture, will be offered during Summer Term 1 (May 22 to June 29, 2018) and will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30 to 9:00 PM. Registration information can be found here.

Food and the Senses: Taste and Flavor Podcast

Image courtesy of maximumyield.com.

Frank Carrieri and Morgan Mannino were tasked with presenting on the topic of taste and flavor for Professor Metheny’s Food and the Senses course. Instead of doing a video presentation, the two decided to create a podcast. This format allowed them to incorporate sound bites from interviews as well as have a conversational approach to the subject matter.

The casual conversation and interviews helped them convey the complex ideas in a simplified form that others could easily digest, one of their goals for the project. They also used this approach to get others to think about how they experience flavor and taste when they eat and cook.

Click here to listen.

Works Cited

Birnbaum, Molly. February 14, 2018. Interview by Morgan Mannino. Personal Interview. Boston, MA

Johnson, Carolyn. February 17, 2018. Interview by Frank Carrieri. Personal Interview. Boston, MA

McQuaid, John. 2015. Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat. chs 1-4 . New York: Scribner.

Shepherd, Gordon M. 2012. Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. Intro, chs 1-4, 13. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rabelais Books: A Cookbook Paradise

by Megan Elias, Director of Gastronomy

An hour and a half north of Boston and just south of Portland you will find cookbook paradise at Don Lindgren’s Rabelais Books. Lindgren is a collector and dealer of antique cookbooks and culinary ephemera. His collection is housed in a large, well lit room in a converted mill building in Biddeford, Maine. Rabelais’s guardian/mascot is a very small, wiry and friendly terrier named Lark. In the far reaches of the space, Don’s wife Samantha Hoyt Lindgren works magic as a textile artist.

It is the kind of place I would not mind being locked into for a week. Or two. Don’s knowledge of cookbooks is beyond encyclopedic because it encompasses not just the facts of publication and trends but also the nuances of interest and innovation. He thinks in categories and publishes catalogs that are invaluable for scholars who need to know what is out there.

To spend a few hours at Rabelais in conversation with Don about what he has, what he’s looking for, and what has passed through his hands is really to hear books speak. They tell us about the people who wrote and published them, read, collected, and bequeathed them. All around the tops of shelves, too, there are large copper pots to remind us that food written is also food cooked and eaten.

I wish I had mapped our progress around the giant room as we started at one end and then moved from case to case as one type of book led to another. It felt like we were really travelling far in time and space, looping around continents and eras—a Korean hand-inked cookbook from the 1930s, a treatise on beer from eighteenth century America—to return to the present in the form of cookbooks hot of the presses.

One of the most interesting things for me to see was a table full of cookbooks and ephemera that had been part of one person’s collection. The collector had obvious fascinations—the agricultural side of food and the instructional, but also a clear appreciation for the marginal—food related things on matchbooks. Here were not just things about food but evidence of a personality, a particular genius. It was hard to resist sitting down at the table and trying to put all the pieces together like a puzzle. Who was he? Why did he care about these things and what connections did he find between them?

Some of my other favorite things were menu templates from the early twentieth century. They are simple sheets of paper with illustrated borders–like invitations–that restaurants could buy for printing the menu of the day. The revelation that an industry existed to supply these templates pointed to the proliferation of restaurants at this time and that in turn pointed to changes in public space and public life. The impulse to offer decorative menus was bound up in the new presence of middle class women in public—these customers were assumed to prefer something pretty to something plain, whatever their personal preferences might have been. A little slip of paper in a big room in Maine showed me a whole world of bustling streets and gender roles in transition but also in stasis… Take a trip to Biddeford and see the world!

And when you suddenly remember that you are corporal being, with a growling stomach, you must visit the Palace Diner, a tiny place in Biddeford that does its own time traveling by keeping alive and yet also perfecting the standard style and foods of traditional American diners: it was the best tuna melt I have ever eaten.

Memories From My Table – Paintings by Laurel Greenfield

Gastronomy alumna Laurel Greenfield is hosting an opening reception for her first solo gallery show at Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc. on February 8th from 5:30 – 7:30 PM. The gallery features some of Laurel’s favorite paintings from the past year and she will be discussing why she paints food as well as the stories behind some of her paintings. You can see more of her work at laurelgreenfieldart.com.

We hope to see you at the reception!