Food, Taste, and the Body: Ingestion and Embodiment in Santiago de Cuba

Abstract

Using a Black feminist embodied approach, this article analyzes the ways in which people in Santiago de Cuba draw on their own embodied practices, sensory experiences, and popular knowledge to determine what forms of ingestion (food, drink, etc.) are good for the body. Influenced by historical ideals of food consumption and colonial entanglements, Cubans use a combination of knowledge gleaned from biomedicine, official nutrition guidelines, and humoral medicine, which are not always in agreement, to ensure that they are taking care of their bodies appropriately. In addition to these external sources, they also continuously assess their own embodied responses to ingestion (e.g., pain, illness, headaches, or other bodily sensations) to determine which foods and drinks should be consumed. Practices of healthy ingestion may also vary between people and circumstance, which people learn over time and from one another, layering on another interpersonal dimension of embodied knowledge. [Cuba, food, embodiment, health, ingestion]

“For us women, flavor is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavor work in urban Senegal

“…While I studied changing attitudes to saf sap I was aware that it was often my presence as a guest that encouraged people to prepare the “heavy” national dishes that served as the vehicles for experimental and flavorsome cooking. I took what Hannah Garth calls an “embodied approach” to studying everyday eating (Garth 2022 ), allowing my own body to register its own responses to saf cooking. In this way I came to recognize the physical responses to food that women described.…”