The starting point for the talk will be Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay “The Culinary Triangle”, in which the author, using the structure of binary oppositions, constructed a diagram of the transition from nature to culture. Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle depicted three categories of food: raw, cooked and rotten. Lévi-Strauss used oppositions such as raw-cooked, baked-cooked to show how the process of processing food symbolizes the transition of man from a natural state to a cultural state.

Contemporary anthropology of food focuses on the study of food in a cultural context, analyzing its relationship to politics, rituals, gender and other aspects of social life. Food anthropologists are interested in what people eat, how this food is consumed, and what cultural values ​​and norms are associated with it. For example, research may concern food taboos, differences in consumption between different social groups or the symbolism of food in different cultures.

This panel will focus on the female culinary experience, emphasizing the role of women in preparing meals, which is traditionally rooted in many cultures. Each of the panel participants represents a different cultural and culinary tradition, which will enable a broad discussion on the diversity and similarities in approaches to food. Ahlam Shibli will talk about the specificity of Arab cuisine in the Palestinian version; Ifi Ude, born in Nigeria, about the culinary customs of the African Ibo people and their implementation in the area of ​​Polish cuisine; Linh Nguyen from Vietnam – about Asian traditions and their sources; Marina Napruszkina from Belarus – about different varieties of North Slavic cuisine in collision with German cuisine; Grażyna Kulczyk – about the change in Poznań’s eating habits when communing with the specific traditions of the cuisine of the Swiss canton of Grissons.