Overview

In Vietnam during the long nineteenth century from the Tây Son rebellion to the 1920s, individuals negotiated changing interpretations of their culinary choices by their families, neighbors, and governments. What people ate reflected not just who they were, but also who they wanted to be. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam starts with the spread of Vietnamese imperial control from south to north, marking the earliest efforts to create a common Vietnamese culture, as well as resistance to that cultural and culinary imperialism. Once the French conquered the country, new opportunities for culinary experimentation became possible, although such experiences were embraced more by the colonized than the colonizers. This book discusses how colonialism changed the taste of Vietnamese fish sauce and rice liquor and shows that state intervention made those products into tangible icons of a unified Vietnamese cuisine, under attack by the French. Vietnamese villagers began to see the power they could bring to bear on the state by mobilizing around such controversies in everyday life. The rising new urban classes at the turn of the twentieth century also discovered new perspectives on food and drink, delighting in unfamiliar snacks or giving elaborate multicultural banquets as a form of conspicuous consumption. New tastes prompted people to reconsider their preferences and their position in the changing modern world. For students of Vietnamese history, food here provides a lens into how people of different class and ethnic backgrounds struggled to adapt first to Vietnamese and then French imperialism. Food historians will find a provocative case study arguing that food does not simply reveal identity but can also help scholars analyze people's changing ambitions.

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Appetites and Aspirations is food studies at its best, but it is also much more. Erica Peters demonstrates with both intellectual elegance and a deeply rooted sense of food how culinary choices are a marker of historical change. Using a diverse array of sources, she goes against the grain to explore everyday life in Vietnam in the long 19th century, affording a penetrating insight into what Vietnamese people wanted to be in a time of economic struggle and colonialism, and into how ordinary people experienced habitus and change, adaptation and contestation, even creativity. Appetites and Aspirations is a gourmet meal which leaves the reader satisfied but not sated. The wide range of narratives of food Peters explores from food insecurity to the classic pho, which emerged in the early 20th when Cantonese noodle soop was enriched by French beef scraps, from colonial monopolies on alcohol and nuoc mam to French fears of food contamination sheds new light on disparities of gender, ethnicity

Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is food studies at its best, but it is also much more. Erica J. Peters demonstrates, with both intellectual elegance and a deeply rooted sense of food, how culinary choices are a marker of historical change. Using a diverse array of sources, she goes against the grain to explore everyday life in Vietnam in the long nineteenth century, affording a penetrating insight into what Vietnamese people wanted to be in a time of economic struggle and colonialism, and into how ordinary people experienced habitus and change, adaptation and contestation, even creativity. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is a gourmet meal that leaves the reader satisfied... The wide range of narratives of food Peters explores ... sheds new light on disparities of gender, ethnicity, and wealth. Food may have been a tool of imperialism; it certainly became a tool of nationalism in modern Vietnam. Nobody would have expected the history of a 'fusion cuisine' would tell as much. -- Laurence Monnais, Universite de Montreal A reviewer of the wide-ranging Appetites and Aspirations could evaluate this rich study along any number of axes: economic history, the history of imperial and colonial Vietnam, or the history of race and ethnicity, to name a few. Nonetheless, food is most emphatically Peters's preferred ground and where she anchors her argument that French and Vietnamese used diet to shape radically divergent identities in colonial Indochina...It would be unfair to expect a study so ambitious to succeed equally well on so many fronts...Nonetheless, this fascinating and suggestive narrative of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial Vietnam will appeal to a wide range of general readers and specialists. H-France Review

Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is food studies at its best, but it is also much more. Erica J. Peters demonstrates, with both intellectual elegance and a deeply rooted sense of food, how culinary choices are a marker of historical change. Using a diverse array of sources, she goes against the grain to explore everyday life in Vietnam in the long nineteenth century, affording a penetrating insight into what Vietnamese people wanted to be in a time of economic struggle and colonialism, and into how ordinary people experienced habitus and change, adaptation and contestation, even creativity. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam is a gourmet meal that leaves the reader satisfied .The wide range of narratives of food Peters explores sheds new light on disparities of gender, ethnicity, and wealth. Food may have been a tool of imperialism; it certainly became a tool of nationalism in modern Vietnam. Nobody would have expected the history of a fusion cuisine would tell as much.--Monnais,

Author Information

Erica J. Peters is co-founder and director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California and has written on various aspects of Vietnamese history and cuisine.

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