“Cozinha medieval”: regionalidade e pós-modernidade em um restaurante gastronômico de uma cidade global

Abstract

Income inequality is a historical issue in Brazil (Medeiros 2016), representing an inheritance of social injustice (Barros, Henriques & Mendonça, 2001). However, in this work, inequality is seen as an entanglement of interdependent economic, social, political and legal inequalities (Costa, 2011). Any answer to it demands time (Medeiros, 2016) and should not be based on private actions of liberal colours (Costa, 2011). This work, was inspired by my professional experience as cook in fine-dining restaurants, where instances of these inequalities were observed daily. My initial objective was to study such restaurants, as an organization and as a possible view of society itself in an attempt to understand the impressions I had brought with me. As the project evolved, its general objective was revised to an attempt to offer a critical study of unfolding dialogues between the employees’ and the organization’s views of their socio-cultural contexts, using the notions of medievality and global city (Alsayyad & Roy, 2006) and foodscape (Johnston & Baumann, 2010; Johnston & Goodman, 2015) as categories of analysis, with further considerations on Brazil´s nation building process, postcolonialism and postmodernity. I proceed, then, with the design of my research framework, choosing to carry out a shadowing ethnographic exercise to obtain the empirical material for analysis, in a finedining restaurant in Uberlândia. As a result, I drew several interpretations from the research corpus, for example, on the relations between labour, capital, and Brazil’s nation building aspects reflected in these organizations. It was also possible to interpret how the work of those organizations’ members may produce symbols, behaviours and representations that could operate as sources of social distinction for those restaurants’ clients, paradoxically, reinforcing the inequality that motivated the research from its outset.