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

"Focused on the making of everyday foods in East Asia from the nineteenth century to the present, Crafting Everyday Food highlights the role of technology in transforming traditional foods into modern and in re-inventing industrialized foods as heritage foods. The seven expert researchers adopt a unique technological perspective to trace the transformation of traditional everyday East Asian food materials - soy sauce, tea, kimchi, and kåoji -- into modern foods, and the appropriation of new items such asbeef and potato into Asian diets. The essays discuss how modern technologies and crafts reconstructed traditional or "authentic" foods and show how global flows of commodities, experts, and consumers, as well as the circulation of knowledge and practices, shaped the East Asian foodscape. The volume weaves together approaches from science and technology studies and historical studies to generate innovative approaches to thinking about technological change, everyday life, and the constitution of East Asia as a region. They argue that technology is not merely a set of machines or tools but is composed of the knowledge, skills, techniques, standards, norms, customs, and tastes and flavors, all contributing to the creation of dietetic, economic, cultural, andpolitical values of foods for everyday consumption. Understanding how these technological evolutions have transformed food production and consumption provides new insights into the complex processes of industrialization and the roles of tradition, 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 dialog, 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 the privileged objects in the discipline of food studies"--