Doctoral Dissertation Research: Agricultural Modernization and Traditional Food Knowledge Systems

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Fast-paced lifestyles, and a massive and commercialized food industry, have contributed to the breakdown of traditional food systems. Nutritional science has already extensively demonstrated that the disappearance of traditional foods is disadvantageous to society because of the health, environmental and economic benefits they offer. The loss can be acutely detrimental, as it has been in the U.S., as the replacement of traditional diets has aggravated an obesity epidemic. Recently, the promotion of traditional diets has re-surfaced as part of initiatives advocating sustainable diets. There is, however, a need to understand how the knowledge and practice of such traditional food systems are lost, kept or modified. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in scientific methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, the project would engage a wider audience in the scientific process, and broadly disseminate its findings to organizations invested in optimizing agricultural production technologies. Melanie Narciso, under the direction of Dr. Virginia Nazarea, will investigate the repercussions of agricultural modernization on traditional food knowledge and practice. This proposed research focuses on the culinary and gastronomic impact of a large-scale agricultural modernization, the Green Revolution (GR), through the study of fermented rice traditions in the Philippines. Starting in the 1960s, the GR introduced modern rice varieties, fast-maturing, pest and disease resistant and high yielding rice varieties in rice societies across the globe. These have been reported to replace traditional rice varieties, narrowing the genetic rice base and revolutionizing the rice landscape's tastes, odors, and textures. This research questions if the resulting genetic erosion and sensory transitions are merely inert phenomena without social ramifications. It specifically explores whether, and if so, to what extent material manipulation of yield varieties translate into traditional food knowledge loss. Using a combination of ethnography and food and nutritional science methodologies, the investigators will probe into the changes in the diversity and physico-chemical properties of the rice supply in the town of Candaba, a GR technology adopting rice farming community known for its fermented rice traditions. They will explore how these changes in material properties of rice alter cognitive perceptions of rice, and subsequently how they prepare and consume their fermented rice. This will provide evidence how the disappearance of many traditional rice varieties and the material properties of rice influence human interaction with their food environments, and how this erodes and/or promotes cultural food knowledge. This will inform programmatic efforts on crop improvement, sustainable diet promotion and biocultural diversity conservation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.