In Situ (Dec 2019)
Le patrimoine gastronomique en Île-de-France, un patrimoine en construction. Retour sur huit années d’expériences
Abstract
Since 2010 and UNESCO’s inscription on its representative list of intangible cultural heritage of the ‘Gastronomic meal of the French’, the question of this sort of heritage has come to the fore in an acute manner for heritage services in general. But for many years now the cultural heritage inventory service of the Île-de-France region, in the course of its regular topographical or thematic surveys, has been identifying and studying elements of this new heritage, not with a narrow and elitist point of view that the notion might perhaps evoke, but in a more general way, taking into account everything connected with ‘eating well’ and with the implied ideas of conviviality and sharing. Everything that might come to be associated with preparing a good meal can be considered: agricultural products, savoir-faire, the places and tools of production, places where products are sold, cooking implements, the arts of the table… The region’s heritage and inventory service has decided to establish a situational analysis of all the elements identified and studied in the field that, in one way or another, can be seen through this new gastronomic heritage prism. It is a complex and multifaceted heritage and different methods and issues are involved in its study. This analysis, carried out for eight years now, has enabled us to bring better understanding and definition to what we are talking about when we speak of the gastronomic heritage. The service has undertaken an on-going process of analysis implying unceasing questioning and the identification of avenues of research based on recurrent interrogations and a major underlying concern: how not to turn this living heritage into something frozen or ossified in the process of identifying it as heritage.
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