Niphatchanok Najpinij
Thai Studies Center, Chulalongkorn University
There are many ways to understand food and its meanings. An anthropological view has been employed to understand food and its meanings in recent literature. According to many anthropologists, food is not only an item transformed for biological purposes (i.e. to satisfy physical needs such as hunger of a human being). Rather, food is understood, named, believed, consumed, as well as produced through the framework of a social setting.
Context and the process of giving words meaning both constructs and is constructed by the culture of a particular society. Culture is a critical thread leading anthropologists to understand meanings of food, the subjects (as well as their own identities), and the purposes of food consumption and production as well as the discursive practices that give rise to such meanings.
Food, therefore, is a subject within a changing context. It is interesting to consider how Thai food has evolved in a contemporary setting such as a five-star hotel where meaning-making processes are constructed by several subjects such as the food and beverage managers, chefs, cooks, staff, and guests from various countries.
It has been found that food is not a material subject. Rather, the meanings of food are contextual. Data from in-depth interviews show that respondents who are hotel chefs, waiters, and customers of the hotel agree that this context plays a critical role in how a Thai dish is named, understood and presented. Interpreting this data from a marketing perspective suggests that the marketing mix of Thai food is influenced by a cultural space. This refers to the fact that there is a common language or repertoire of food where in this case, product, price, place, and promotion of food and beverages within a five-star hotel signify the following meanings: richness of ingredients (rather than local ingredients), professional culinary practice (rather than local and customary ways of making food), luxury presentation (rather than a traditional household presentation approach), full service (rather than in home consumption behavior), and a consumption of a contextual meaning of food within a five-star hotel (rather than what the food is made for in a household for day-to-day consumption). This study confirms the work of many authors that food is about culture and culture is about food.
The study, however, adds that the meanings of food within a culture in this age of globalization can be a complex phenomenon. This is because food, or in this case the meaning of food, has been used in many emerging spaces such as five-star hotels where this cultural setting also suggests an emerging meaning of food and an on-going meaning negotiation process. This paper also addresses the challenges between the tensions of adaptation and conservation of the Thai food culture.
(Presented in the International Conference – Thai Food Heritage: Local to Global, 4-6 August 2009, Tawana Bangkok Hotel, Bangkok, organized by The Project of Empowering Network for International Thai Studies (ENITS), Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF))