Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of "Authentic" Foods and Drinks

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Cultural products often depend on ideas about authenticity for commercial success, eliciting emotional responses from consumers and evoking a sense of local, ethnic or even national identity. To designate a product as authentic can be a politically, economically and culturally charged process involving multiple levels of meaning. Authenticity can be an official legal status; it can be used as a cynical marketing ploy; it can reflect a sense of cultural belonging; it can constitute a defence of particular production practices. Such ideas of authenticity are fundamentally constructed through narratives about the past and future, and employ various temporal concepts used to join together distinct pasts, presents and futures. Producing or consuming a product deemed authentic offers a means of enacting or performing values associated with particular interpretations of the past or visions for the future. In this sense, authenticity can be a central ingredient in the celebration, commemoration or valorisation of different identities, cultures, histories and socio-economic practices. However, it can also marginalise, exclude, exploit or damage others. Consuming Authenticities will examine how and why narratives about the past and future are used to construct ideas about the authenticity of specific cultural products. The project will reflect closely on the power relationships-across socio-economic, racial, gender and/or generational lines-that are involved in prioritising, selecting and excluding different temporal narratives from these ideas of authenticity.These questions will be addressed through four case studies on foods and drinks that are, or have been, emblematic of particular identities and cultures around the world: pulque (an alcoholic drink from Central Mexico), acarajé (a street snack from Brazil), flaounes (celebration Easter pies from Cyprus) and Welsh cider. Exploring relatively everyday items of cultural consumption from multi-national contexts will enable us to incorporate diverse perspectives and experiences into the research process and explore how ideas about authenticity are received by audiences from different cultural backgrounds. A range of non-HE collaborators, including food writers, cooks, producers, retailers, and migrant community groups, will be invited to contribute their own impressions about the authenticities of each product during participatory events; in turn, their views will be integrated into the project's central output, a recipe-style book. This project will examine how and why temporal concepts that are routinely mobilised to connect together understandings of the past, experiences of the present, and visions for the future -like origins, timelessness and tradition- are used to construct authenticity in different contexts. We will also assess the relationship between these temporal categories and the spatial, or place-based, concepts that contribute to constructions of authenticity, such as locality, homeland and metropolis. By bringing together temporal and place-based concerns, the project seeks to develop the CFF theme by providing a methodological model for analysing other temporal concepts (e.g. progress, legacy) and how other cultural products and experiences (e.g. heritage sites) are constructed as authentic.The project draws on academic expertise from several disciplines, including history, post-colonial literature, linguistics and anthropology, and explores four cases that range across two centuries and two continents. This academic team will work closely with the People's Collection Wales, a project partner with extensive experience of public engagement, to engage food producers, promoters, consumer groups and the general public. We will therefore embed knowledge exchange in the research process, so that cross-disciplinary and cross-period insights inform the different case studies, and a genuine dialogue can occur between academics and non-HEI stakeholders.