Crafting Everyday Food : Technology, Tradition and Transformation in Modern East Asia

Focusing on East Asia from the nineteenth century to the present, Crafting Everyday Food highlights the role of technology in transforming traditional foods into modern ones and in reinventing industrialized foods as heritage foods. The seven expert researchers adopt a unique technological perspective to trace the transformation of traditional fermented foodstuffs typical of the region―kimchi, soy sauce, kōji, and tea―and the appropriation of new foods of nonlocal origin, such as beef and potato, into Asian diets. The essays discuss how modern technologies reconstructed traditional or “authentic” foods, showing how global flows of commodities, experts, and consumers, as well as the circulation of knowledge and practices, shaped the East Asian foodscape. Weaving together science and technology studies with historical studies, the volume generates innovative approaches to thinking about technological change, everyday life, and the foodways of East Asia as a region. Understanding how these technological evolutions have transformed food production and consumption provides new insights into the complex processes of industrialization and the roles of taste and heritage in East Asian modernity.

Each chapter takes up a unique food item with its own complex past and traces gradual―and at times dramatic―change, allowing new relationships to emerge between the creators, consumers, and their surrounding world. Truly multidisciplinary in approach, Leung and Stevens bring together scholars and methods from a range of fields into a coherent transnational dialogue, resulting in an innovative way to define East Asia without relying on geographic or linguistic boundaries. The study of “everyday” foods, consumed by ordinary people on a day-to-day basis, provides a productive perspective for understanding East Asian cultures as sociotechnical systems, pushing back the role of elite and special foods as privileged objects in the discipline of food studies.