The TASTE Project, funded by the European Research Council and running from June 2024 to the summer of 2029, examines shifting food preferences and culinary change. Centered on three Indonesian diasporas, the project explores how people have adapted their culinary traditions to new environments in the past and continue to reshape them today. In doing so, we scrutinize how cultural, historical, social, economic, and environmental factors operate, intersect, and occasionally conflict in these transformations.

The project highlights and compares the culinary traditions of three communities with (partial) roots in the Indonesian archipelago, now residing across three different continents: the Javanese in Suriname, the Malays in Sri Lanka, and the Cape Muslims in South Africa. As relatively small minorities in multi-ethnic nation-states, the knowledge of these groups is often overlooked both in academic publications and national discourses. Yet, their foodways tell an important story of enduring colonial legacies, survival, local adaptation, creativity, and, ultimately, forgotten connections.

Our approach involves extensive fieldwork with interlocutors in the destination countries, complemented by a thorough examination of newspapers, archival documents, cookbooks, and a variety of food-related texts rarely found in conventional libraries. By reconnecting communities with these documents, drawing comparisons across national borders, and co-authoring with local knowledge holders, we center culinary change as a lens through which to understand our rapidly evolving world.

Funding

The TASTE Project is funded by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, awarded to Tom Hoogervorst.