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Abstract
Fermented foods are products of biochemical processes that contribute to people and planet healthy diets. Despite their benefits, some fermented foods have disappeared or are marginalized in certain food cultures. To prevent further loss of these sustainable traditions, it is important to study how fermented foods are abandoned, maintained, or altered. In this dissertation, I examined how fermented food is culturally transmitted in a changing landscape. I focus on burung asan, a fermented fish traditionally prepared in the Philippine town of Candaba, where a swamp teeming with fish has allowed buru-making to prosper. Informed by anthropological theories associating landscape, material, memory, and the senses with memory and cognition, I investigated whether the material reconfigurations of the changing landscape have corresponding sensory and memory shifts, and in turn, what their implications are for fermentation practice.
This study focused on the collective agency of changing landscapes on taste and the place-based taste’s agency on continuity and change of burung asan. To address these questions, I conducted an ethnographic study in the village of San Agustin from September 2019 to August 2021. I followed the life histories of its rice, fish, people, and the memories therein and their collective agency on taste and the buru tradition.
I found buru-making in San Agustin continuing despite the changed fermentation landscape—characterized by new forms of fish, rice, and major players in buru-making. Key to its persistence is its deliciousness, which, in this case, means clean buru. This standard of deliciousness was created from a memory-charged rice and fish landscape characterized by new forms of ingredients and buru-makers. The clean aesthetic fostered the production and dominance of deodorized and whiter buru and the continuity of the said fermented product in the place.
Buru-making provides food and livelihood that has contributed to a “delicious life” – one that enables the achievement of life aspirations and performance of progressive identities. Overall, these results show the role of the landscape and the memory therein in shaping taste. They also illustrate taste memory’s agency in maintaining fermented food traditions in the midst of changes in the landscape