Stéphane Le Bras, historian: “Food plays an essential role in exchanges between cultures”
Stéphane Le Bras is a lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Clermont-Auvergne. His current research focuses on the excesses and tensions that affect the food and alcoholic beverage markets. He recently published, with Corinne Marache, La Malbouffe. A History of Poor Eating Practices from Antiquity to the Present Day (PUFR, 2025).
Food is omnipresent in cultural representations. How do you think the portrayal of food shapes our collective imagination?Food has created shared cultural references for centuries. Since ancient times, representations of food and the time of their sharing are depicted on vases and paintings. Today, Internet users post photos of what they eat on social media, and influencers try to develop new eating habits or make product placements. Whether through social media, cinema, or literature, culture codifies collective food norms. These imaginaries also play a key role in the construction of our individual identities. Take Proust's madeleine . What sends the narrator of In Search of Lost Time back to his past is neither a smell nor a place, but a cake—the little madeleine dipped in tea constitutes a sensory reference for him and, by metonymy, a concept of identity reference shared by many French people.
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Le Monde
