School of Social and Political Science

Description

This research explores dietary tastes and culinary practices among immigrants in Paris and Chicago. I identify three theoretical insights in research on food and immigration: the immigrant nutritional paradox, the reinvention of food traditions, and the deromanticization of culinary authenticity. Using ethnographic data (including in-depth interviewing and observation), the analysis centers on immigrants as creative agents endowed with personal experience of various cultural contexts. First, I describe a shared taste for freshness and naturalness. Second, I show how immigrants craft quotidian culinary practices that they qualify as simple. Third, I outline their perceptions of commonalities and singularities between the cuisines of the various countries they have lived in and the cuisines of fellow immigrant groups. Ultimately, I reach the insight that in both cities alike, immigrants recraft their judgement of the good quotidian diet as simple cooking using fresh produce. This has implications for recent research on immigrants' environmental values, knowledge, and behavior, and for the design of dietary guidelines in France and the United States alike.