Ethnologia Europaea

EDUARDO’S APPLES

This article examines the ambivalent status coinciding with the symbolically rich meanings of wild berries as food, relying on data drawn from Estonian ethnographical archives, contemporary food blogs and nutritional and culinary literature. Wild berry memories from pre-modern times up to the present encode personal as well as collective values related to wild food, foraging and food culture, but also feelings related to belonging. The analysis explores the contemporary nostalgia for and high culinary status of wild berries. Diverse values attributed to good food are contained in these berry discourses: tradition blended with gourmet cooking and a healthy anti-consumerist lifestyle combined with the desire for exclusive tastes.1

This paper explores the political struggles behind the definition of geographical indication (GI), and the different uses for these food labels. It examines both the geopolitical and local conflicts around the definition of what GIs are, and the implications of GIs for the conceptualization of property. The article argues that the international geopolitics embodied in GIs is not simply creating class stratifications; it is dispossessing rural, local and underprivileged populations of a crucial resource: their tastes. Ultimately, the article argues for the utility of property as a theoretical and political concept, and suggests that we see it as a site of conflict.1

The protection of regional specialties by the EU-instrument of geographical indications fundamentally changes the status of food; formerly common products become newly appropriated ones. The processes of selecting specialties, and declaring them to be a kind of culinary heritage, shed light on the interplay between legal, political, and economic interests: the transformation of (assumed to be) commonly shared goods and knowledge into legal collective properties evokes state interest and creates new power relations. Two German cheeses, Odenwälder Frühstückskäse and Allgäuer Emmentaler, both labeled with the “protected designation of origin,” provide a framework for examining these processes of propertization and commercialization. In these examples it turns out that establishing, valorizing, regulating and commercializing regional food is based on cultural arguments.

Cake is mandatory at celebrations in Norway and a very important female contribution. But due to its sweet and fatty ingredients the cake has become a metonym for obesity, and thus an important sign in the battle against the national weight problem. Playing a part in many different contexts, the cake is torn between different kinds of orthodoxy. In this article we describe layers of meaning by introducing three settings, which are very different in character yet able to link through our use of the cake as a common denominator: the cultural institution of coffee and cakes in a Norwegian rural village, cakes served and controlled in an educational institution for minority women and cakes as part of Friday get-togethers at an academic institution.