Referring to individual examples of an infinite number of problems, topics and plots related to gastronomic culture, it becomes obvious that nutritional research is a gigantic interdisciplinary scientific field in which researchers more and more tend to read and interpret it in the social, political, historical, philosophical, confessional dimension. These are topical issues from nutritionism and traditional ethnographic “features” of food (its rituality, confessional marking) to its symbolism in the context of maintaining a collective ethnic, national, cultural identity in ethnocultural communities, the formation of gastronationalism (DeSoucey 2010 ) and banal nationalism of the everyday (Billig 1995); from the communicative functions of alimentary artifacts and the role of food as a language in general (Lévi-Strauss 2008) to foodscapes – globalization and post-globalization “typical food landscapes” (Appadurai 1996: 32); from the “politically tinged” cuisine (Montanari 2021) as a “sign” of self-identification of communities and a “tool” of state practices and strategies to food as a determinant of the consolidation/delimitation of “us” and “them”, “local” and “aliens” in the context of migration and diasporas study.
Under these conditions, field research remains one of the priority types of scientific knowledge, and the archiving of materials makes it possible to preserve for future generations a thesaurus of information on food culture. In the era of digital technologies, we are faced with phenomena and facts that require the development of new methods of fieldwork and the preservation of materials. The main topics of the section:
1) Formulation of new topics in the field programs for the study of the anthropology of nutrition.
2) Determination of the main issues of field research for the study of modern ethno-cultural phenomena in the technogenic world of production, consumption and evaluation of food products.
3) Development of a methodology for maintaining field documentation, creation of digital field archives.
