Gastroimaginaries

A framework for conceptualizing narratives of food and place in the American South

Bibliographic Data

ID12799258
AuthorsCatarina Passidomo (Washington and Lee University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume28
Issue3
Pages618-631
Publication date2024-07-26
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFood Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1552-8014 • E-ISSN: 1751-7443
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/15528014.2024.2381304
OpenAlexW4401026609
LanguageEN
References cited26

This article develops the concept of gastroimaginaries – narratives that use food as a rhetorical device to define and encapsulate what are believed to be the essential characteristics of a people, place, and time. The article adapts the concept of social imaginaries – defined by Taylor (2023) as "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others ... " – to underscore the significance of food-related narratives for shaping, reinforcing, and potentially contesting regional identity and place-making projects, and for signaling membership within a particular group or imagined community. I apply the gastroimaginary framework to an analysis of food media representations of the American South, arguing that dominant gastroimaginary frames – which emphasize potent but generally uncritical ideas like hospitality and nostalgia – generally elide the realities of food system labor and environmental and other externalities; alternative or subversive gastroimaginaries, however, can both attend to these past and present realities while imagining more radical futures

Aesthetics · Economics · Environmental ethics · Externality · Futures contract · Hospitality · Identity (music · Narrative · Political science · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Tourism · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Organic Food and Agriculture · Ecology

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