Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: Food as Community Archives in Ireland

Food permeates every aspect of life; there is no class or culture that does not eat, no society that has not developed its own cuisine. Since 2010, twenty-nine entries related to food have been added to the UNESCO Representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, designating food as a complex marker of cultural heritage. This paper argues that as archives seek to preserve and steward culture, they must consider how that includes food records. Food records in Ireland are decentralized, and few in number, leaving a gap in cultural repositories. Through semi-structured interviews, this thesis analyses the interactions between archivists and archive users involving food records, while exploring what can be considered a record, and how ephemeralness in cultural collections creates issues of access and preservation. Connecting food records to cultural heritage, under the umbrella of community archives, increases community engagement as barriers to the access and preservation of food records decrease. The findings demonstrated that food collections prove essential in highlighting the voices of community members when utilizing a community archive paradigm. The archivists and archive users were concerned with themes of access, education, and preservation as a means to steward cultural heritage through food records for future generations, while shifting outdated perceptions of what records have archival value. Food records and archives are at a pivotal moment in Ireland; culturally, the preservation and continued use of food records for community education and identity is an essential step for archives to take.