Asakura: Although you are both engaged in the study of food cultures, you take completely different approaches. Please describe your own approaches to your studies.

Ishige: The foundation of all research in cultural anthropology is fieldwork. To understand food, I emphasize first putting it into my mouth and actually eating it. While conducting a survey of pasta in Italy, I ate three pasta meals a day for ten days in a row, with four kinds of pasta at each meal. At restaurants, they serve not only pasta but also a main dish and a dessert, so it was quite tough. When I returned to Japan, I was really in bad physical shape.
In addition, conducting fieldwork, I really feel that food can be an important communication medium for connecting people. When I went to an unexplored region in New Guinea, I happened to become surrounded by some local people making bows and arrows. When I gave them some salt—a precious item for those people—and allowed them to lick it, they immediately withdrew their warning signals.

Asakura: I feel the same. While doing my fieldwork in Korea, I was able to earn trust by enjoying the dishes served by the families I visited for my survey work.

Sabban: I study food cultures from an historic point of view, through literature. When I studied the history of food in France and Italy, I not only translated cooking literature from Medieval French, Latin, and Italian, but also actually cooked dishes based on those recipes. In addition to the difficulties in finding the same food ingredients as those from the past, one problem I had was that even if the ingredients were indicated, the amounts were not explained. For example, if the text says, "Add a lot of cinnamon," I cannot know how much I should actually add. Overcoming these difficulties one way or another, I reproduced many recipes. Alongside my husband, who is also a food culture researcher, I perused the literature of cuisine from Renaissance and 7th century France and reproduced the recipes. I found recipes from a wide range of areas including England, Southern Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. It was interesting that while the recipes were similar, as they are all European countries, there were still delicate and subtle differences.
Furthermore, as I lived in Japan for two years from 1985, I was able to improve my knowledge of the history of food in China. At that time, Japan had a better collection of Chinese literature than China itself, and I read many history books on Chinese cuisine, which allowed me to conduct a comparative study of Chinese and French food cultures.

Asakura: You have both written many books, including some on noodles. Professor Ishige published Bunkamenruigaku Kotohajime (The Beginning of Cultural Noodlology), in 1991, while Professor Sabban's La Pasta (2012) was translated into Japanese.

Ishige: Around 1991, there were not many records comprehensively describing the history of noodles in Asia, so I decided to do it myself. I visited many countries in Central Asia to conduct a survey. While Asian noodles use flour as a raw material and there are five techniques for making them, I discovered that all originated in China. In addition, our survey revealed that Chinese noodles were introduced as far afield as the eastern coastline of the Caspian Sea, to the west of Central Asia.

Sabban: In La Pasta—Storia e cultura di un cibo universale, I summed up changes in the pasta culture developed in Europe and China, based on historic materials. Insofar as I investigated, China's influence extended to the Caspian Sea. For example, Turkey has a dish called, Manti, which was apparently introduced from China. My book also refers to cooking methods. In China, they twist and roll to make noodles, but in Italy, they roll out noodles with a mattarello, and it is never done manually. Such differences between the cooking methods of Europe and Asia are very interesting.

Asakura: Your books clearly reveal a difference in each of your approaches to studies. It is most interesting.

Asakura: Professor Ishige, as a true pioneer in the study of food cultures in Japan, how do you view things?

Ishige: In the 1970s, when I started my study of food cultures, I was told, "It is embarrassing for men to discuss food," and there was even a trend that it couldn't be recognized as a genuine academic field. But over the years, interest in food has increased greatly and nowadays the number of researchers who write doctoral theses on food cultures is ever increasing. In addition, I hear that Ritsumeikan University will establish a College of Gastronomy Management. I believe this is a wonderful thing.

Asakura: The College of Gastronomy Management will be the first college in Japan where food will be totally taught and studied from an interdisciplinary viewpoint encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Going forward, we aim to develop the institute into Japan's top college covering food, both in name and reality.
Finally, what is your message to the next generation of researchers who will support the study of food cultures?

Sabban: In France, quite a number of young researchers are interested in food culture. However, many of these people position food culture as a theme to be approached from the perspective of economics and other specialized fields, and I feel that the number of researchers who will actually explore food culture itself is not so great. I believe it is necessary to have an attitude of focusing on food first and deepening one's understanding of the subject by digging ever deeper.

Ishige: Food is essential for life and is something that is familiar to every living being. We tend to turn our interest to things far from us, but by maintaining the viewpoint that we ourselves and our surroundings are important subjects for research, we can discover new things.

Asakura: Thank you very much for your time today.