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| PROGRESS IN THE FOREIGN GEOGRAPHICAL FOOD STUDIES |
| CAI Xiao-mei1,2, LIU Chen3 |
1. Department of Tourism Management, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
2. Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography Research Center, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China;
3. Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, London TW20 0EX, UK |
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Abstract With the trend of ‘Cultural turn’ and inter-disciplinary, human geographers have turned their interests again to the material culture. Therefore, these years, as the important form of material things, food becomes one of the most significant objects in human geography research, especially in the western world. However, The senses of smell, touch, taste and hearing have been neglected as a consequence of the emphasis on ‘ways of seeing’, so that there are only three reviews on the topic about the geographies of food, and just few geographers are studying food both abroad and domestic. So, in this paper, we will focus on the themes and tendencies in the research about the geographies of food in the western discourse, in order to provide some new directions to the research on geographies of food in China. The results shows that, there are four main themes in the geographical food studies, those are:(1) the symbolic meanings of food;(2) the food economics;(3) the cultural politics behind food; and(4) the research links food and people's identities. And the three tendencies of western geographic food studies are:(1) emphasizing the globalization and international mobility, and their impacts on food meanings, food economics, food policies and people's identities from eating and preparing food;(2) focusing on the complicated meanings of food and the connection between people, food, physical settings and the society. That is to say, the geographers regard food as a kind of material culture, and explore the social and cultural meanings of food;(3) turning to explore the spatiality of eating and food cultures from discussing the regional diversities of food meanings.
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Received: 10 August 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
