Culinária regional : história, saberes e identidade regional no Vale do Rio Pardo/RS - Brasil.

Abstract

The present dissertation consists in analyzing the contribution of food models brought by European colonizers to the formation of the culinary identity in the Rio Pardo Valley region/RS – Brazil, from the colonization movements of Italian and German immigrants, during the nineteenth century. Those immigrants brought to the region cultural traces and food habits from their original regions, which embedded characteristics from the food models of the Romans and barbarians, two models that marked Europe for centuries. Throughout the years, those influences mixed with others, such as those from the Amerindians and African-Americans, generating interactions that were of big importance for the formation of the region food habits. Nowadays, however, we live in a period of homogenization and internationalization of eating habits, promoted mainly by the process of globalization, factors that deeply affect the particularities of regions. The globalization process has provoked changes in the socio-spatial structure of regions and places, defining new values, and, as such, modifying territories. Thus, the globalization and industrialization of food has influenced territories, resulting in a detachment from the specific eating habits of each place or region. Those transformations in the way of producing food promoted significant changes in the communities, creating patterns of preference, hiding knowledge, altering fundamental eating and culinary traces, significant elements in the constitution of the cultural and social identity of a region. Thereby, culinary has become an important element of affirmation and resistance to the processes of homogenization and contributes, in a significant way, to the development of a region through the commercialization of characteristic regional food products, produced by regional farmers, which, in turn, generates value and maintains alive the production processes, the traditions and sociocultural manifestations of a people.