Category talk:Mesoamerican cuisine

Category rename?

Could we move this to Category:Mesoamerican cuisine instead? The current name is a tad contrived.

Peter ^Isotalo 20:07, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

I've moved all the relevant articles.

Peter ^Isotalo 10:25, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm inclined to disagree. Although the majority of articles that were in this category might be cuisine-related, the category was created with a larger scope in mind. "Cuisine", as our wiki article has it, is "...a specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a specific culture". The scope here on the other hand, was intended for topics relating to diet, food and food production in general- subcategories and articles which together would refer and describe the subsistence methods employed by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples. The study of diet and subsistence is quite a common component of any archaeological/anthropological investigation into historical cultures, capable of standing on its own merits. It's much less frequent to encounter the word cuisine, unless it's specifically referring to (mostly cooked) meals and their preparation.

True, there aren't many articles on diet and subsistence topics at the moment, but there is certainly scope for there to be more created. Equally true, a lot of those that do presently exist are on specific meals, meal preparation and cookware- things which could also be identified as cuisine-related, I guess. Maybe the cuisine cat could be a subcat of this one; I still think this category works, or could be made to work.--cjllw ʘ TALK 13:58, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe you're focusing too much on minor nuances in the wording of our own articles and the fact that "cuisine" tends to be used more for "civilized" nations and cultures. Any set of practices that are related to food in a human culture is about a cuisine of one sort or another and therefore must also include diet. There is absolutely no demand that cuisine be specific to cooked food. It's like claiming that a fruit salad isn't a dish while a bowl of porridge is. You can't separate diet and cuisine unless you decide on extremely specific semantic definitions of the two terms. It's more work keeping them apart then covering both aspects in the same article.

Just about all our articles on food practices are called "XXX cuisine" and some of them are very broad in scope, like European cuisine, African cuisine, South American cuisine, etc. We even have non-cultural specific cuisines (vegetarian cuisine). I see no reason why anthropological and archaeological studies of food habits can't be defined as a study of cuisine. If anything, "diet and subsistence" (the need for both terms is odd in itself) should be a sub-category of cuisine, not the other way around.

As far as I'm concerned, we have tons of articles on diet and subsistence. They're just using the more convenient and all-encompassing term "cuisine". If we can have articles like medieval cuisine without anyone so far having demanded that the content on diet and subsistence be forked, then I don't see why we have to when it comes to Mesoamerican cuisine.

Peter ^Isotalo 16:04, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Heh- I don't think there's any proposal to "fork" cuisine articles on the table ;-) Perhaps it's just that I'm more familiar with the archaeological & historical literature on mesoamerica, where terms like "diet" & "subsistence" are frequently and I'd say more commonly used than "cuisine" (with the honourable exception of Sophie Coe's books).

Anyways- given the nature of the few articles that are (or were) in this category, I won't press the point, and we can use Category:Mesoamerican cuisine for now. If and when other related articles take shape, this can be revisited to see whether the cat/subcat scheme is still the most appropriate.--cjllw ʘ TALK 05:12, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, there's going to be plenty chewing of fat when interest starts to pick up. ^_^

I think the problem is rather that food history and the study of cuisine has been severely neglected until very recently. All the authors of the books on medieval cuisine that I read point out that there weren't any dedicated scholars until sometime in the early 80s. Many of them also lament that the topic is not even considered a proper discipline of its own. When I looked for sources on medieval cuisine in the libraries here in Stockholm is was a bit annoying to see that books about the exact same topic (food/cuisine history in general) had been classified as belonging to at least three separate topics; cultural history, economic history and ethnology/ethnography. And these books were all very general in scope. In some cases different libraries had even classified the exact same titles under different topics. I think that was a pretty clear indication of how immature this aspect of (cultural?) history seems to be right now.

Peter ^Isotalo 12:23, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

I suppose that we'll just have to redress this imbalance here in wikipedia ourselves, building on your sharp contributions. I've moved this category talk page over to go with the active/new/replacement cat:Mesoamerican cuisine, and will either delete or soft-redirect the 'old' cat:Mesoamerican diet and subsistence. I'm still half-considering whether it would be useful to retain, even if only as an umbrella cat for related others, which might not fit into cuisine.--cjllw ʘ TALK 09:07, 15 May 2007 (UTC)