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Frysian foodie routes & roots: The role of culinary traditions in the construction of local identity and culinary tourism

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11:00 AM, Sunday 6 Aug 2023 (30 minutes)
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Food is increasingly being understood as a site for exploring a number of aspects of human life in society, since it is as once essential to human survival and central to human organizing in the “social, economic, technological, and even political” realms of the human experience (Kalivas, 2009, p. 207; Agyeman & Giacalone, 2020). Komarnisky (2009) describes the foodscape in reference to the ways in which food plays a dual role in being “connected to place and connecting places” (Huang, 2020, p. 100; Yasmeen, 1996). Kalivas (2009) describes food customs as an area of “cultural maintenance” (p. 207). Food is the ultimate “intimate, daily performance of identity, culture and community” (Agyeman & Giacalone, 2020; Bailey, 2017). The production and sharing of local food and recipes is deeply embedded in the construction of a local, regional, and national identity, and thus culinary traditions play an important role in the construction of cultural and culinary tourism. For immigrant communities, maintaining and connecting with one’s home culture is often achieved through the making and sharing of food. Migrants carry their foodscapes with them, embedded within their memories and hopes, creating “an umbilical link between where one is from and where one is now. Food provides a grand stage for the performance of translocal identities, border transformation, belongings, and becomings in a new land” (Agyeman & Giacalone, 2020). However, conversations about “local food” can serve to inadvertently alienate and isolate newcomers to a place and create a barrier to comfort and acceptance, wherein their chosen food does not align with the privileged “local” (Huang, 2020). In this conceptual paper, we will discuss the ways in which family recipes are implicated in the construction and maintenance of culture for immigrants and people with migrant backgrounds living in the Dutch province of Fryslân. We wish to emphasize that notions of what it is to be Frisian rarely, if ever, also include representations of immigrant, migrant, resident with migrant backgrounds, and refugee populations who contribute to the cultural landscape, and thus the making of cultural and culinary tourism worlds. Their stories are our stories, “woven within the collective human story, a thread that speaks of recipes from all cultures, carried in memories, on folded and stained piece of paper, in pockets and bags, like identity papers, only meaningful to the beholders, only fully real once cooked and eaten” (Situational Strangers, 2020, p. 281).

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