Talk:Peasant foods

Where to start?

I've been thinking about how this article can be cleaned up and would welcome ideas. In its present form it is both demeaning and imprecise. To start with peasants are actually indigenous peoples who may or may not be poor in the western sense. For instance medieval peasants were landholders or freemen, the equivalent of a rural middle class as opposed to the poor landless serfs/slaves. Peasant foods are actually foods which have been found to be adaptable to traditional lifestyles of such indigenous persons or original persons. -- Trilobitealive (talk) 19:18, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I remember Jeff Smith (aka "Frugal Gourmet") said that Soul Food was whatever your grandmother cooked. My grandmother would sometimes cook a peasant/poverty food from "the old country" that was considered very disreputable by her friends (in this case, pinkelwurst and kale), so she would open all the windows in the house so that none of her friends would notice the smell. This was poor (very poor) food from a poor farming community, and has about the same social status of collard greens or ketchup sandwiches (slices of bread with a thin layer of ketchup for flavor) in the US, essentially that if one had any more money, one would eat anything better; although in my grandmother's case "better" means "better social class." Tangurena (talk) 23:11, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: some examples of dishes with information of how they were considered poor people food?!? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.50.33.29 (talk) 23:04, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

There is a saying in the U.S. South, Grits ain't groceries, i.e., something to fill the belly but nothing more. Which is pretty much the case, nutritionally.Well, niacin, I suppose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:CF99:2080:3589:F8A0:9402:37B3 (talk) 01:36, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Soul Food??

I have deleted "soul food" as an entry in the "see also" section. Unless the author can make a convincing connection between "poor people's food" and soul food, this deletion is warranted--there is no tight correlation between socio-economic status and the consumption of soul food. Kemet 00:09, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Is this a joke? Someone needs to provide proof that food traditions developed by American Slaves are warranted as "peasant food". Literally many of the food traditions came from using cheaper/hardier crops and meat pieces considered trash by the more well off within the US. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.251.234.86 (talk) 02:48, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

organizing

I'm thinking maybe instead of just a long list of foods, that many of these fall into similar categories -- they're all poverty dishes, so they have things in common. valereee (talk) 11:18, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Instant noodles

I'm not sure we want a list of every cheap food in the See Also valereee (talk) 17:01, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Article is problematic

This article starts with the definition "Peasant foods are dishes specific to a particular culture, made from accessible and inexpensive ingredients, and usually prepared and seasoned to make them more palatable." That is, it seems to include all cheap food, not necessarily eaten or prepared by peasants. Does it include the food of the urban poor? What is that last clause ("usually prepared and seasoned to make them more palatable.") supposed to mean? -- that the food of the rich is not prepared and seasoned to make it palatable? What does "specific to a particular culture" mean? -- that bean soup or bread or gruel or boiled greens are not peasant foods because they're eaten in many cultures?

The observation "Characteristic recipes often consist of hearty one-dish meals, in which chunks of meat and various vegetables are eaten in a savory broth, with bread or other staple food." is ridiculous. Most peasants in most of the world rarely eat meat. And "hearty" is an unsubstantiated WP:PEACOCK word -- many peasants ate thin gruels and soups.

It continues with some romantic cliches, like "Peasant foods often involve skilled preparation by knowledgeable cooks using inventiveness and skills passed down from earlier generations. Such dishes are often prized as ethnic foods by other cultures and by descendants of the native culture who still desire these traditional dishes."

Then we come to the "common types" section, which has a long list of dishes. Many of them seem to be legitimate peasant foods, but where are the sources? Some of the main articles (but not many) have sources showing that these are foods of the poor or of peasants, but others don't. And some are clearly not "peasant food": goetta was apparently invented in Cincinnati, where there have never been peasants ... though it may be based on German peasant foods. It seems likely that meatloaf and shepherd's pie were originally fancy city dishes.

Can we try to base this article on some reliable sources? For example, for Italy, a good corrective to the romantic view is Karima Moyer-Nocchi's Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita. --Macrakis (talk) 18:34, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Start over from zero?

Right off the bat, this article offers no source for its definition of "peasant foods". Too often these are whatever a sophisticated eater finds hearty and down to earth, with no knowledge of the history whatsoever (a recent NY Times article treated boeuf bourguignon - first recorded in Paris, not the countryside - as such a dish). So an expert citation on the very idea would be useful. Then there are no footnotes for the individual items confirming them as peasant foods. I go to the first one (Balkenbrij) and right off find "it allowed farmers to use various less-desirable parts of pork, which were made more palatable by being added to a seasoned porridge of groats or flour." This kind of "the poor came up with this trying to use less-desirable cuts" is an old chestnut for whatever is caricatured as a peasant dish (and almost always ignores how rarely European peasants ate meat at all). Is it footnoted in the original article? It is not. (Unfortunately, it probably could be, since an earlier generation of food historians was happy to pass on colorful myths about their subject; what's really needed here is a footnote proving an actual historical source for the claim - which I doubt exists).

I have no doubt many of the other articles are just as flimsy. At the very least, an editor could add a warning that this kind of claim is often subjective and that nothing in this article has been subject to Wiki's more rigorous standards? (Note that the article on the world's oldest restaurants is similarly uncritical of each restaurant's own claims. These sorts of articles are almost inherently low-quality.) 2600:1700:8D40:9B60:C9B0:B96C:E260:D8E2 (talk) 16:46, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Re: Borscht

I don't see borscht listed here, which is classified as a typical peasant food. Viriditas (talk) 01:33, 21 May 2024 (UTC)