Cooking up food memories: A taste of intangible cultural heritage

In this study, the author conceptualizes food memories as a form of intangible cultural heritage: an immaterial inheritance enacted and ritualized in everyday foodways. Informed by Marcel Proust's literary writings on food and memory alongside David Sutton's gustemology, this study investigates how a community's local residents construct food memories as forms of intangible cultural heritage. The author conducted a fifteen-month qualitative inquiry with eight local families in Oklahoma, United States. Specifically, the author applied a series of ethnographic methods and cooking as inquiry: a qualitative method using foodmaking as a collaborative activity during the fieldwork. Findings show food memories entail a narrative structure revolving around five constructs: people and communality, foodmaking and the body, sense and synesthesia, emotional reveries, and evocative sceneries. Contributions related to areas of intangible cultural heritage, food memories, gustemology, and practice are discussed.