The Rotten Renaissance in the Bering Strait

Abstract

Situated in the Bering Strait region of Russia and Alaska, the ethnographic documentation presented here elucidates the role of the olfactory aesthetic in shaping human attitudes toward food. The focus is on the practices connected with the use of marine mammal products and recipes prepared by means of aging and fermentation. Since recent times, the olfactory responses to these historically important foods have been changing to where their smell is becoming undesirable on the whole and particularly unacceptable in certain social contexts. The present attitudes range from genuine fondness to an array of aversions. For many contemporary consumers, the social implications of the smells associated with consumption of aged foods and marine mammal products pose a daily concern, which they address in part through extensive washing and laundering. The featured ethnohistorical reconstruction captures the story of Soviet-era near annihilation of certain products and recipes in Chukotka, followed by a partial revitalization in the post-Soviet period. Examples of the gustatory, olfactory, and social experiences connected with food on both sides of the Bering Strait are offered. Cumulatively, these experiences speak of the extent to which foodways and food security are shaped by the realm of senses.Had Claude Levi-Strauss (1978) devised his culinary triangles in an ethnographic setting circa the Bering Strait, a tricky qualifier called "tastily rotten" would need to find its place amid the "raw," "rotten," and "cooked." The "tastily rotten," lovingly called so by the connoisseurs, is a fragrant array of locally harvested animals, fish, and plants that have been provided with an environment in which they "rot" into a desired condition. The biography of this food is connected with the

Traditional Diet and Environmental Contaminants in Coastal Chukotka I: Study Design and Dietary Patterns

“…The overall extent to which individuals and families mix store-bought and local foods in their diet varies to a high degree and is determined by a complex array of intersecting factors, including age, occupation, monetary income, time of year, access, experience with state institutions such as boarding school, family relationships, personal preferences, and culturally held ideas about food, health, and status in society. Attitudes toward certain foods vary among individuals, members of different generations, and people of different occupations [16]. They are also based on a number of other parameters including the concern for contaminants.…”

Traditional Diet and Environmental Contaminants in Coastal Chukotka IV: Recommended Intake Criteria

“…Seasons and social occasions are associated with specific foods, formal elements of specific dishes (like other forms visual art, edible creations also follow principles of harmony, variety, proportion, and balance in arranging the line, shape, space, texture, color, and value elements of a dish), the etiquette of eating specific dishes, and sequencing of the sensory experiences (such as, for example, starting the meal with dipping small pieces of dry meat or fish in seal oil, combining pieces of hot-temperature boiled meat with pieces of fresh-frozen meat, and taking sips of hot meat broth at the end of the meal). In the current body of work, we build on the literature that focuses on Arctic foodways [20,21,22,23,24,25] and the wider approaches to the study of cuisine that are prominent in food anthropology [26,27] in order to take a step toward the latter. While the insight we present here focuses on coastal Chukotka, part of our intention is to encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration that synergizes the research methods and analytical tools of humanities and sciences to deepen the understanding of the dietary practices and patterns.…”

“…Although the attitudes toward the specific types of food vary complexly based on the number of factors [21,22,23,24], the overwhelming majority of the people in our study region uphold the belief that eating local foods is vital for their physical survival, spiritual well-being, community vitality, and the possibility to exist as a people. They also believe that the entire way of life enveloping the consumption of local food, including the activities of harvesting, processing, preparing, and eating, is at the core of a healthy lifestyle.…”

Fermentation and the Ethnobiology of Microbial Entanglement

“…While some ethnobiologists may hesitate to engage with the political machinations of food safety regulations that dominate microbiopolitics research, environmental humanities scholarship emphasizes pungent and hyper-local cultural keystone ferments through which communities and ethnic groups stake claims to identity (Yamin-Pasternak et al 2014). Some microbes are used to make nationalist arguments, as when Korean food scientists analyze microbial ecologies to argue that Kimchi is uniquely Korean and not Japanese (Jang et al 2015).…”