The Centre for Sensory Studies is pleased to present SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow Camille Bégin as part of the Fall Semester Sensory Studies Research Seminar.
Sensory Economy: Tasting Food in the 1930s US
This presentation offers a sensory history of food in the New Deal era and, in doing so, introduces a new analytical vocabulary to the fast expanding field of American sensory history. Using taste as a category of analysis requires considering this sense as part of larger networks of cultural, social, and affective exchange that I label sensory economies. This notion invites us to consider taste not so much as a physiological character or the static quality of a dish, but as the result of a process of circulation and exchange in specific cultural, spatial, and textual contexts. It is an analytical tool to explore the social and cultural history of taste in the 1930s and conduct archival sensory analysis. I develop my study of sensory economies through an analysis of the archive of one New Deal agency, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), whose extensive America Eats program aimed at recording regional foodways. FWP workers documented American food in the midst of economic upheaval, the industrialization of the food system, and changing understandings of race and ethnicity. America Eats then documents the dynamic interaction between taste, place, and race in the 1930s. The analysis for instance explores how, in the wake of the Great Migration of African Americans to northern metropolis, the taste of southern food underwent a significant change: once associated with a region, it became linked to race.
Camille Bégin is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University. Her research focuses on the history of food and the senses. While at the centre she will be finishing her book manuscript entitled Tasting the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food (University of Illinois Press, Studies in Sensory History Series). Camille relocated to Canada from France a decade ago and earned her PhD from the University of Toronto (History) in 2012.
#SensoryEconomy
This seminar is free and open to the public.
