SSMS 4315
The “Agriculture, Land, and Environment” Research Cluster at the Orfalea Center is pleased to announce a lecture by Prof. Daniela Gurtiérrez Flores (UC Davis), entitled “Beyond the Edible Commodity: Culinary Labor, Knowledge and the Making of the Spanish Empire."
Much food scholarship has traced the biography of edible commodities —chocolate, maize, sugar— following their paths across oceans and into new culinary habits. This talk takes a different path. Rather than centering what was eaten, I ask who made it, and under what conditions. By recentering human agents and their labor, I trace how cooking shed its ill-repute and began to gain social standing in the late sixteenth century. This shift, rooted in the Humanist reappraisal of manual knowledge, opened new space for cooks to claim creative and intellectual authority. Yet this elevation was structural: it depended on, and actively produced, a hierarchy that rendered the culinary labor of the underclasses as menial, uncreative, and invisible. It is through these tensions, I argue, that the kitchen emerges as a discursively contested space where the ideological debates and political dynamics of the Spanish Empire revealed themselves.
Daniela Gutiérrez Flores is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis. She is currently working on a book project titled A Century of Cooks, which investigates the emergence of the modern notion of cooking. Her work has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Mellon Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, among others. She has collaborated in interdisciplinary public humanities projects that bring together scholars, activists and artists, such as the podcast Esculent.