Exploring the Meaning of Contemporary Food Culture in Taiwan since the Late 90''s

• Main Authors: Dai-Hua Shen, 沈岱樺
• Other Authors: 楊明昱
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/r48gcx

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 大眾傳播學系碩士班 === 97 === This thesis tries to understand the cultural meanings behind the “food-mania”, and the way how taste of food has been constructed. Therefore, the core problematic is how food scenario is represented and discoursed in contemporary Taiwan? By appropriating the French sociologist Bourdieu’s concept “field”, this thesis hence consider food as a cultural field. Furthermore, from a cultural history approach, this thesis tries to elaborate the food scenario in Taiwan since 60’s: from the nostalgic to lifestyle, and from cooking practice to life aesthetics. Finally, through analyzing the interpretations of taste from the cultural intermediaries, we will realize the way of how interpretations of the cultural intermediaries are constructed and whether these interpretations reproduce or strengthen status quo of the taste of food. This thesis argues that it has been through the intertwined and struggled within the different forces for decades, then construct the current situation of food field. From the theoretical point of Bourdieu, agents who have the same social positions in social field will be embedded in the same social conditions and context, in that way then they might have the similar habitus and interests. According to this, the author, by analyzing the food discourse form the chefs, food critics, food writers, and food journalists, argues that these cultural intermediaries produce the symbolic constructs for the popular. However, when cultural intermediaries once won the symbolic power, they also gain the symbolic violence beneath the neutral and objective gesture at the same time, so it is much harder for normal people to critic the discourses of the cultural intermediaries. And that makes people misrecognize the legitimacy and authority as nature, hence that will deeply cover the uneven distribution of material conditions and cultural resources.