Culinary Messaging - Can I Bring Something? : Complexity and Ambiguity in Diverse Food Gifting Practices

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Constance Kirker  

Encompassing both personal preferences and myriads of cultural prohibitions and prescriptions, food choices can be used to create a sense of community and belonging, or exclusion and separation. Cultural practices involving sharing and gifting of foods can also be a way of including and even educating a trusted outsider. With significance more than that of a casual exchange, a food gift can convey the history of a culture or group. Participating in and observing culinary customs are ways of signaling respect for traditions both of one’s own culinary heritage and that of others. Embedded with multiple meanings, food gifting can also fulfill an obligation or establish a relationship hierarchy. The rules of food gifting can be complicated. What is appropriate? What might offend? This paper considers two long-established gifting practices: the exchange of mooncakes in the Mid-Autumn Festival in Chinese culture and its diaspora and the tradition of omiyage, souvenir or local food, in Japanese tradition.