Saberes e sabores da maré em Saubara – Bahia: comida, um ritual à mesa

Abstract

In this essay, food knowledge developed and transmitted for generations in the municipality of Saubara, Bahia, Brazil, is exposed. The text contains fragments of the participant observation of a master’s research concluded in 2018, about the cultural manifestations in Saubara and the contributions for the preservation of the city’s mangroves. In order to be closer to the studied reality, different methodological tools were used: observations, informal conversations, image bank, questionnaire, interviews and field notes. According to Bogdan and Biklen (1994), studies that use observation in qualitative research have the researcher as their main characteristic. Thus, the perception of events or actions can be better understood, as they are observed in their environment. This kind of knowledge is intimately linked to the daily contact with mangroves, a place of life in which productive and symbolic relationships observed in loco are established. The theoretical contribution that guided the work has come especially from Tuan (2012; 2013). The concept of topophilia was built by Yi Fu Tuan (1974) and is the key to the understanding of the “love of the place”, a guide to think about the environment in the way it is perceived by social actors. It made us understand how the tide is intimately interwoven with the memories of food in the city, highlighting popular knowledge as a social, cultural and environmental system. Recipes with family secrets inscribed on the memory resist to time and nourish the body and the soul. The tide fruits are the main ingredients for the survival of these recipes transmitted by generations.