Based on an urban living setting, I have a great interest on food culture. I’ve been happy about how we have versatile dining experiences in New York City. I would like to take advantages of the city and embed values in our dining experiences: dining as a way to maintain biodiversity, a mean to understand world cultures, and a communication between people from different backgrounds.
Hypothesis:
1. Expanding the utilization of endangered food to encourage food purchase helps food preservation. Living in a market-driven society, it efficiently preserves those that had been threatened by market standardizing.
2. People can gain the fundamental knowledge of food culture through communal environments such as dormitories or workplaces.
Stakeholders and Research Targets:
From my research I found most of my stakeholders are my research targets as well. Ideally, this is a win-win situation which both of the stakeholder and the researcher (me) will find beneficial helping each other.
- Slow food USA: Seeks solutions on maintaining food diversity. Having developed programs preserving endangered food, it has informative documents on my interested topic.
- Individual participants on slow food movement: Concern the slow food movement and are eager to help. Most of them collect information in various areas of food culture, i.e. food education, quality food suppliers, local agriculture.
- Farmers: Find a solution to keep cultivating the endangered food. They are people who provide first-hand information, for example, the difficulties on cultivation and market size.
- Food Retailers: Expand product lines. They are models to study food business.
- Urban villagers: Discover a fresh, fun, and delicious dining experience. Observing their food consumption and eating patterns helps me to find a potential solution.
- Cultural anthropologists: Understand the dynamics of food cultures. Keeping in contact with knowledgeable experts is an effective way to study cultures.
- Students who live on campus: Enjoy cultural exchange experiences. From them I can get direct feedbacks on their views of different cultures.
Research Methods:
1. Observe the developing solutions through related organizations; be involved in the programs or attend several events that related to my topics. Identify the successfulness and the shortcomings of the programs.
2. Contact individual participants on slow food movement and know different perspectives from their thoughts.
3. Be connected with the agricultural experts. Find the fundamental facts on endangered food: Why is it endangered? Why are they valuable to be preserved? Who are the customers?
4. Understand the users: create questionnaires and life events to find out their concerns on food. What’s their motivation in terms of food consumption? What triggers their interests on food culture? What are the emotions they have on dining?
5. Getting into business: interview people from food business. What are the considerations for them to decide if the food is markedly valuable? How well and what do they know about customers psychology? What are the difficulties to provide quality food service?
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1 comment:
Hi Evanee,
I enjoyed reading your post. I am, like you, very grateful to live in NYC, in some part because of a love of multi-ethnic food of a very high quality. The food standards are higher here than any other place in the US, I would say. Quality is kept high by the refined taste of the residents, and the competitive attitude between restaurants, each one being compared to the others. I also agree with your observation that eating multi-ethnic foods causes cross-cultural "contamination", which leads to better awareness of the full range of international cultures and cuisines. This is probably why people from every country appear to feel at home and comfortable in New York City. In any case, I see a lot of possibilites for exploration here.
Having said that, I am less enthusiastic about the emphasis on "endangered food"; this seems less important compared with your other ideas, like the socio-political implications of many groups eating one another's food habitually in one city.
I think that you should consider doing a significant amount of on- site investigation, meaning, you have an amazing laboratory all around you, you just have to use observational skill and careful experimentation to gather valuable data. The key will be to find out as much as you can about how dining experiences affect real people, through spying on them or by confronting them.
steven
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