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In this book, contributors examine the many meanings of the term
'nomad' through the study of food habits. Food and beverage
products have become just as nomadic as other objects, such as
telephones and computers, whereas in the past only food and money
were able to move about with their carriers. Food industries have
seized control of this trend to make it the characteristic feature
of consumption outside the home - always faster and more
convenient, the just-in-time meal: 'what I want, when I want, where
I want', snacks, finger food, and street food. The terms reveal the
contemporary modernity and spread of food practices, but they are
only modified versions of older and more uncommon forms of
behavior. Mobility, in the sense of multiple forms of moving about
using public or individual, and possibly intermodal, means of
transport, on spatial scales and temporal rhythms which are
frequent and recurring but variable, responding to professional or
leisure needs, can serve as a basic premise in order to gain
insight into the concept of food nomadism.
Food is unquestionably a total social fact and 'we must now think
of it as a social fact that is characteristic of new global
lifestyles' (Rasse and Debos, 2006). The structural organization of
the market and eating behaviors are undergoing great changes.
Strictly speaking, this development is not really new. Every
century, every major caesura in the history of humanity could
illustrate a process of inventions, adaptations, and innovations
which have transformed eating habits. The contemporary period,
however, is different because of the extent of these major changes
and the global importance of some of them. Thus, organizations such
as manufacturers, retailers, and transportation companies are all
highly inventive in offering individuals eating solutions which are
adapted to their new lifestyles; lifestyles which are based or, at
the very least, affected by increased mobility and continuous
moving around. Of course, travelers have made journeys throughout
history, and they have always had to deal with the issue of how to
eat when away from home. Whether associated with long-distance
journeys, random travels, or tourist trips, mobility has been an
important factor in the creation of catering and eating solutions
which range from the very simple to the elaborate. Today, this
increased mobility makes us think of practices which have been
described as nomadic. However, can a link be found between the
nomadism of people who move around in order to find food for their
herds or for themselves and the nomadic forms of eating of our
mobile societies? The collection of contributions that we are
proposing will try to provide answers to this. The traditional
understanding of the concept of nomadism generally refers to
pastoral practices which are to be found in many populations such
as the Lapps, the peoples of Central Asia,or the Tuaregs. The term
'nomadism' is also used to describe the lives of hunter-gatherers
and some sea nomads, such as the Bajau of Indonesia, and the Moken,
the Moklen, and the Urak Lawoi of Thailand. It has also been used
to refer to gypsies, or Roma, who, since a French law of 1969, have
been called 'gens du voyage' (travelers). Although mobility is an
invariant in these different types, it is nonetheless true that the
term refers to the ways of life lead by organized social groups who
are the bearers of a specific identity. However, it is impossible
to simply correlate these nomadic practices with the habit of food
consumption outside the home or living place since nomads do not
have any home other than where they stop on a temporary basis. The
concept of nomadism has undergone profound changes in recent
decades, taking on a semantic scope that gives it the ability to
just as easily include working practices, communication processes,
and new forms of social behavior. In this book, we intend to
examine the many meanings of the term 'nomad' through the study of
food habits. Food and beverage products have become just as nomadic
as other objects, such as telephones and computers, whereas in the
past only food and money were able to move about with their
carriers. Food industries have seized control of this trend to make
it the characteristic feature of consumption outside the home -
always faster and more convenient, the just-in-time meal: 'what I
want, when I want, where I want', snacks, finger food, and street
food. The terms reveal the contemporary modernity and spread of
food practices, but they are only modified versions of older and
more uncommon forms of behavior. Mobility, in the sense of multiple
forms of moving about using public or individual, and possibly
intermodal, means of transport, on spatial scales and temporal
rhythms which are frequent and recurring but variable, responding
to professional or leisure needs, can serve as a basic premise in
order to gain insight into the concept of food nomadism. Have we
passed from a group and territorially-defined way of eating to a
solitary and mobile, so-called nomadic way of eating? This vision
connecting mobility and freedom is a little far-fetched for several
reasons. Firstly, the food of the nomads is not nomadic. Within the
context of traditional nomadism, people move about but they always
eat inside their habitat, which is itself mobile. On the other
hand, the ideology of Western modernity goes together with the
ideology of movement, which is itself deeply linked to a perception
of time. In this approach, space is not only territory, it is also
space-time. Sedentary people, whether by choice or time constraints
and pendular migrations, have to live, think and eat 'nomad'. In a
multi-author work published in 2002, the authors distinguished two
forms of mobility: moving about in order to do one's shopping, and
moving about in order to have meals away from one's home. In the
first case, they saw a sedentary specificity, whereas in the second
they saw a 'nomadic' (in quotation marks) specificity. This latter
was linked to a so-called 'semi-nomadic' way of life. Also included
in this second category were migrant workers who meet up in public
places such as Paris' Sahelian cafés, which were described by one
of the contributing authors (Hug). The comparison between the
different fieldwork studies presented enabled us to perceive some
common features of this food mobility: the idea of saving time, the
limitation of social control, and, for young people,
experimentation in food inversion strategies. The authors also
pointed out that eating outside the domestic space should not be
seen as a solitary experience as it takes on a social meaning,
according to which one can want to eat with one's peers, avoid
having to eat with one's family, and make the most of the
opportunity to build up networks. Sociological and anthropological
works generally show that eating outside the home is not
necessarily synonymous with anomie. Eating within the context of
mobility generates specific terms of supply, portability,
preservation and preparation techniques, consumption patterns, e.g.
sitting, standing, together, alone, walking, or with one's hands,
and the encountering and assimilating of new models, such as the
exchange of recipes and techniques, and the discovery of new
products. Nomadic food consumption, just like the products which
contribute to it, is therefore a powerful source of exchange and
discovery, of the widening appeal of new foods and recipes, and of
innovation in taste.
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