Over the last fifty years, the production and consumption of chicken meat have soared in Bolivia. This article analyzes the political, economic, and cultural developments that have led to the popularity of chicken meat in this country. It also asks who has benefited from this success story. The author relies on data from one year of multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia to provide an account of the history of industrial chicken meat production in the country. This article particularly focuses on the role that national elites and their political entanglements have played in the development of the poultry sector. Marketing campaigns playing on desires to join Western modernity have fostered a taste for industrial chicken meat. Constant overproduction has kept market prices low, so that chicken has become available for the masses. The supply of cheap chicken meat also has been on the political agenda. This article concludes that the expansion of industrially produced chicken meat has mostly favored the upper and middle classes, leaving the poorer population with products that are cheap but of doubtful quality. Under the guise of a “sovereign” supply of cheap meat, an immense business opportunity has been created.

The history of soy sauce in Korea has been viewed as a progression from premodern handicraft to modern industrialization. Questioning such a linear perspective, this article examines the history of soy sauce during the late Chosŏn (1392–1910) and colonial (1910–45) periods through the lens of taste. Traditional soy sauce made from blocks of fermented soybeans called meju appeared only in the eighteenth century alongside the standardization of homebrewing. This, however, did not lead to a standard taste of soy sauce, as taste was understood to be naturally variable across households, and women were the arbiters of taste in each family. The notion of Korean soy sauce possessing a coherent taste emerged during the colonial era. As commercially brewed, and later industrialized, Japanese soy sauce entered the Korean market, taste gradually acquired a new role for consumers as a guide to navigate the increasingly heterogeneous foodscape. Focusing on the practice of blending and pairing different kinds of soy sauce, this article argues that taste became a site of culinary experiments and an instrument of knowledge building that linked the premodern and modern modes of making and cooking.

This article explores a cultural history of peppercorn and its famous characterization as a “numbing spice.” It investigates how the quality of “numbing spice” extended from East Asian cosmologies that engaged with peppercorn, also known as mountain pepper or sanshō 山椒 , as a medical, literary, and culinary object. Medieval and early modern encyclopedias in China described how the plant's vivid colors reflected cosmological relationships that promised better health and eternal youth. The plant's desirability represented what I call “numbing aesthetics,” in that its taste was directly tied to its appearance and utility. When burned, boiled, or crushed, forms of peppercorn could treat hemorrhages, hair loss, swollen scrotums, and toothaches. Beautiful peppers were more effective; ugly peppers were less effective. These many types of plants had many kinds of names with origin stories that derived from young girls, young couples, pigs, and frogs. As a social metaphor, pepper dust became a popular metaphor for describing confined concubines. This article later argues that these qualities fell away when biologists attempted to reduce the plant into its active molecular components in the twentieth century. Tokyo-based chemists imperfectly distilled numbing juices from the pepper's bark and fruit to define numbness as a single unit of flavor, even when numbness was not a classical kind of flavor and more closely resembled tingling vibrations. But by becoming a quasi-category of flavor, the molecularization of peppercorn would diminish its long history of cosmological associations that were gendered, practiced, and otherworldly.

After the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, Tokyo rebuilt and extended its transportation infrastructure to bring the major areas for residence, business, and pleasure within walking distance, and that sparked a new genre of food writing, the Walker's Guide to Dining ( tabearuki ). First published in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, and continued up to the mid-1930s, the books by different authors that shared the title Walker's Guide documented affordable places to eat and new communities of restaurant customers, while pioneering new ways to write about food. Gaining particular attention in these books for their inexpensive and varied menus and their mixed gender clientele were trending restaurants called shokudō , a term that referred both to diners and dining halls in department stores. The Walker's Guides and the diner / dining hall can be called technologies of taste for the way they assembled diverse culinary experiences and made them legible for a mass market.

In those neighborhoods that epidemiologists identify as “food deserts,” access to food is difficult and limited to unhealthy options, whereas in “food oases,” access to healthy food is easier and widely available. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexican Chicago, this article moves from the deterministic, spatial frameworks of food deserts and food oases toward a meaning-centered framework of residents' creation of food access and acquisition. Many residents feel that, given the metropolitan structure of Chicago, they can access the resources necessary for their gastronomic lives. Further, they do not conceive of food access as embedded in a static environment but as created from their activities and their opportunities for mobility. They treat the wider Chicago metropolis as their community, particularly areas that are easily accessible by car. Immigrants explain that they can find products from their homeland. They report that compared to past decades, the availability of Mexican products is greater today: both a larger variety of products and an increased diversity of outlets that sell these products. These findings suggest that in the case of Mexican Chicago, the dual imageries of food desert and food oasis are inadequate. Residents highlight access to transportation and the presence of stores that cater to a wide variety of eaters.