Tastescapes in Ghana. Eating, tasting and culinary praxis in Northern Ghana

The issue of food and eating, taste and taste making is currently being an object of heated discussions within the humanities, including anthropology. Eating is perceived here not only as a physical act of providing fuel for our bodies, but as a social act, functioning within localized habitus, tradition, conditioned by a social practice, en- and acculturation, dislocation, memory, identity and processes of transition, and many others. As such, eating comes across as an important social act (or total social act, as D. Sutton suggests), through which meanings are created, conveyed and upheld, and as such it partakes in the creation of social reality on the micro, as well as on the macro scale.
Physical act of eating is always accompanied by an experience of taste, which is by no means less important. As profoundly bodily, organic, individual act, the importance of it slipped anthropologists, who deemed other senses, like vision and hearing more culturally relevant. Smell, taste and touch, possibly under the influence of such philosophers as Aristotle and Kant, remained lower in the hierarchy of importance for cultural conveyance. In modern anthropology of the senses however, the taste has been rediscovered as a tool of transmission of culturally important, specific meanings, especially in those areas, where verbal or visual communication is insufficient or entirely unable to pass on the necessary information. To taste is not only to physically experience the properties of a certain substance, but to act upon preferences, which happen to be culturally created.
In my research project, I am focusing on tastes and tasteful practices in their cultural and social environment in the Upper West region of Ghana. My research site is limited to the municipal area of Wa, the regional capital of some 100,000 inhabitants, where I am conducting the second phase of fieldwork till the end of July 2019. Here, a few subjects have surfaced as my main focus. First, it is the incremental influence of the western food items, and new types of lifestyles, that demand a change in diet. Youth, although invariably attached to the traditional food, no longer wants to devote time and effort to cook exactly the way their mothers and grandmothers cooked. Simplification and transition to new, available western products take place. At the same time, modern food is seen as unhealthy, as opposed to the traditional, which in turn, does not propose any excitement and definitely less taste. This juxtaposition of old and new, changing lifestyles and continuous adaptation of new food elements into local taste-scape, together with new narratives about tasteful food, is the main subject of my interest.
Methodologically, I underscore participation and participant observation which are truly the only tools to allow me to share the corporeal experience of tasting. Moreover eating local food and
praising it, gains me popular appreciation and respect. Apart from the aforementioned, I resort to semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Methodology poses a great challenge here – not only
through my own adjustment to the local tastes but in grasping the nuanced way in which food and taste is referred to.