Division of Sociology, NTU Complexity Institute & NTU Chinese Heritage Centre
jointly invites you to attend the following Seminar on:
Taste, Culture and Nature: Connecting Cities with their Food Sources
With
Prof Richard Wilk
Professor of Anthropology @ Indiana University
Date: Friday, 10TH April 2015
Time: 1500Hrs
Venue: Chinese Heritage Centre (CHC) Auditorium
Abstract
Taste is one sense that has not attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences. Is the sense of taste socially constructed, a
product of history and culture? Or is tasting a physiological activity that has evolved to guide humans to the most nutritious foods?
In this paper I argue that however tastes are formed, they are crucially important in the structure of the global food economy, because
taste so often has indirect and unintended consequences for natural environments and people thousands of kilometers away from the
taster. New tastes and preferences do not emerge just anywhere; they are consistently generated in cities, and there is evidence that
cities have been important sources of taste for thousands of years. But when products go through so many intermediary hands and
organizations, they tend to acquire fictional or fanciful origins, and sometimes magical properties, cutting off the flow of information
from the environment to the market. The price paid in the city for an exotic plant or animal may have very little relationship to the
scarcity or value at the point of origin. In this paper I explore some of the commodity chains that bring food products from distant
seas to the tables of diners in Singapore and other cities in East Asia. I find the naming and classification of foodstuffs to be particularly informative on this issue.
About the Speaker
Richard Wilk is Distinguished Professor of anthropology at Indiana University where he runs the new Food Research Center, and a
PhD program in Food and Culture. He has also taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), New Mexico State
University, and University College London and has held visiting professorships at Gothenburg University, the University of Marseille and the University of London. He has also worked as an applied anthropologist with UNICEF, USAID, Cultural Survival and a
variety of other development organizations. Most recently he has testified as an expert witness in several Indian land tenure cases in
the Belize Supreme Court.
Trained as an economic and ecological anthropologist, his initial research on farming and family organization in Belize was followed
by research on consumer culture, globalization, television, and beauty pageants. At the same he has pursued research on energy consumption and consumer culture in the USA, and he was one of the first anthropologists to connect consumer culture with climate
change. His work on food questions the history and recent evolution of global supply chains. His most recent book is “Rice and
Beans,” co-edited with Livia Barbosa, and a textbook on the anthropology of everyday life, co-authored by Orvar Lofgren and Billy
Ehn, coming out in a few months.