The University of Nottingham's Taiwan Research Hub presents a talk by
Dr Eric Siu-Kei Cheng, National Taitung University
From Slow Food Festival to Fine Dining Table: Politicized Foodscape, Gastronomy, and Social Sustainability in Eastern Taiwan
Wednesday 9 October 2024, 4 -5.30 pm, Room D12 Monica Partridge Building, Hybrid event
Talk abstract
My presentation examines how and why Taitung’s slow foodscape, a process and outcome of simultaneously bottom-up and top-down governance, has provided opportunities for residents to reinvent foodways. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Taitung’s indigenous community and food network, I will show a farmer’s case study to examine the emergence of the gastronomic network of fine dining chefs, gastronomic and local food intermediates, and farmers. Considering factors of ethnic/local identities, alternative food politics, and marketing/branding of smallholders’ products, I will analyze how the slow foodscape celebrates and interacts with indigenous foodways, which become hybridized and are included in Taiwan’s glocalized culinary art, agri-food branding, and gastronomic tourism. I argue that the residents’ reinvention highlights their multiple identities and practices; it also empowers Taitung, widely regarded as “a less developed and socially unsustainable county,” to embrace cultural diversity, livability, and hence more feasible social sustainability, to respond to the mainstream development discourse and practice of Taiwan and global capitalism.
About the speaker
Eric Siu-kei Cheng is a Hong-Kong-born anthropologist specialized in sustainability and food. His research focuses on the food system, material culture and posthumanism. His ethnographic fieldwork is conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He publishes academic articles in Chinese and English. He is also an applied anthropologist working with NGOs, indigenous people and social innovation practitioners to promote a more sustainable lifestyle and livelihood. He is now investigating the microscopic multispecies interactions in the aquatic world to respond to the literature of the more-than-wet ontology in social science.
Co-chaired by
Dr Chun-yi Lee, Taiwan Research Hub, University of Nottingham and Dr Desmond Sham, Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham