“I have always had a personal interest in cooking, but it has also long been a problematic area – between pleasures, temptations and taboos. Making it my subject of study and taking a scientific look at it allowed me to “deal with it”, and to put at a distance, in a way, the very sensitive and intimate side that it could have for me. Because like many young girls, I found myself very fat during my adolescence, and I had a complicated relationship with food.
I’m part of that generation that’s tried every diet, including quasi-criminal stuff. This is also what pushed me to work on the perception of women’s bodies, on “physical beauty”, and more recently on all the digital tools that allow you to measure your body. I was thus able to reconcile personal questions and social questions.
After studying anthropology, I turned to sociology looking for a subject that dealt with food. I obtained funding to do a thesis on the social perceptions of culinary exoticism. I compared the way in which the French and the Germans perceive foreign cuisines, based on women’s magazines from the 1930s until the 2000s: perceptions change according to history and cultural contexts (migrations , tourism). Thus, in France, we have a strong interest in all the cuisines of the former colonies, all the more marked because we have an elitist gastronomy which has always been enriched by what comes from elsewhere.
“Eating in season”, a class imperative
When I was recruited at INRA, I began to work on how individuals perceive the standards, regulations and injunctions surrounding food: health standards, corpulence, nutritional standards and more recently environmental standards. The representations are different according to the social categories, within a very fragmented, polarized society.
Thus, when the wealthy categories strongly adhere to the imperative of “eating in season” and the constraining practices associated with it, this is not necessarily self-evident for the working classes, who believe that eating out of season can be a pleasure, a way of freeing oneself from an excess of constraints. Major public health campaigns struggle to reach these populations. By going into the field, I try to take into account other practices and other visions of food.
I grew up surrounded by culinary traditions, especially Alsatian by my mother, who cooks very well. I like traditional dishes and these symbols that punctuate the seasons, like this Alsatian Easter lamb, which is prepared in a terracotta mold and offered to children on Easter Day. It is a very common, domestic and shared tradition. There is something reassuring in telling oneself that it is there, that it always has been and that it will remain so, at least in my own story. »
Food through the seasons. The seasonality of food practices, Adamiec C., Julien MP, Régnier F. (dir.) Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, coll. Table of Men, 2020.