What's in a name? Recipes and geographical connotations in postwar Flanders.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the globalisation of the food chain entirely erupted and
invoked severe effects on food habits worldwide: The golden arches of McDonald's
became omnipresent, home-made meals made way for 'plastic' convenience food,
and conviviality seemed to vanish rapidly. However, according to food sociologist
Claude Fischler, the globalised food chain provoked a state of gastro-anomy from the
1980s onwards. Gastro-anomy refers to a situation in which food has no
straightforward identity and since food is crucial to human beings' identity
construction, contemporary society is undergoing an identity crisis. In an attempt to
re-identify, people (re)turn to 'familiar' regional and local food, says Fischler.
As a historian, I want to take Fischler's theory as a starting point for an investigation
of identity construction in Flanders during the period 1945-2000. Did Flemings invest
in an identification process related to regional and local food? Who invested in this
identification process and why? When did traces of identity formation based on
regional foodways occur? I want to answer these questions based on an analysis of
three women's magazines: the monthly magazine published by the Women Farmers'
Association, De Boerin (The Farmer Woman)/Bij de Haard (Around the Fireplace);
the urban weekly, Het Rijk der Vrouw (The Woman's Empire); the monthly magazine
of the Socialist Anticipating Women, De Stem der Vrouw (The Woman's Voice), that
shed a light on working families' food habits. The recipe pages of these magazines
will be selected and afterwards, a quantitative analysis of the recipes will take place.
When did regional or local connotations surface? How did the number of these
connotations evolve? Finally, a qualitative analysis will interpret these figures and
will link them to the theory on food and identity.