Images of foodscape: Contemporary craftwork in the "medieval cuisine"i Carlos Henrique Gonçalves Freitas School of Business and Management, Universidade Federal de Uberlandia, Brazil
[email protected] Cintia Rodrigues de Oliveira Medeiros School of Management and Business, Uberlândia Federal University, Brazil
[email protected] Introduction The idea of this research is associated with the notion of foodscape as "physical, organizational and sociocultural spaces in which the clients/guests encounter meals, food and food-related issues including health messages” (Mikkelsen, 2011, p. 209), and the term "medieval cuisine" as a transhistorical analytical category – in the sense of medieval modernity as developed by Alsayyad and Roy (2006). Due to characteristics of its services, products and target groups, the work in fine-dining restaurants demands for its kitchen workers learning not only cooking techniques, but also new tastes, ways of presenting dishes and service rituals (Ferreira, 2012). In addition, the kitchen staff are often poorly paid, have no prior experience and often poor schooling (Cavalli & Salay, 2007; Coelho & Sakowski, 2014). In fine-dining restaurants, cooks usually need to learn about new aesthetic dish- presentation patterns, which follow mainly French cuisine and differ greatly from the looks of local traditional dishes or of self-serviced dishes from a restaurant or home (Lopes, Souza & Ipiranga, 2014; Benemann & Menasche, 2017); or even to learn inventive preparations that are often a hallmark of fine-dining restaurants (Benemann & Menasche, 2017); as well as to adjust local tastes as the Brazilian very sweet preferences contrast with the more moderate European palate that often guides haute-cuisine. This research attempts to interpret how the food and eating binomial, places and people are interconnected and how they interact in the production of a foodscape.