Thomas Parker: Taste as biocultural, relational, and experiential
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kaméa Chayne
4.8 • 694 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why is it that cuisines have historically been dismissed as a serious field of study? How have social factors, such as cultural norms and class, influenced people’s perceptions of the prestige or disgust of different foods across different times? And how are acquired tastes and market demands for food shaped by the broader food landscape that people are situated within?
In this episode, Green Dreamer’s kaméa chayne speaks with Thomas Parker, whose latest book is Paranatures in Culinary Culture: An Alimentary Ecology.
Join us as we explore what is possible when we deepen our connections with the sources of our foods, and what it means to understand taste as multi-sensorial, experiential, and context-dependent — not just based on the objective biochemical compositions of what we ingest.
We invite you to…
- tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app;
- tap into our bonus extended and video version of this conversation on Patreon here;
- and read highlights from these conversations via Kaméa’s newsletter here.
Song feature: “I am the Earth” by Olivia Mancuso (@oliviamancusomusic)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | People still have a hard time ingesting something if they're not used to it in their culture. |
| 0:05.5 | And the Duke experience allowed us to try to understand what sort of sub-natures might be for different people |
| 0:12.0 | and different cultures and different times. |
| 0:28.0 | Why have cuisines historically been dismissed as a serious field of study? |
| 0:34.1 | How have social factors such as cultural norms and class influenced people's perceptions of different foods across different times? |
| 0:38.0 | And what is possible when we deepen our connections with the sources and stories of our foods? |
| 0:44.1 | This is Green Dreamer, and I'm your host, Kamaya Shane. |
| 0:48.5 | Today, we're honored to speak with Thomas Parker, whose latest book, which we focus on in this episode, is |
| 0:55.2 | Para Nature's in Culinary Culture and Elementary Ecology. There's a lot of fascinating layers |
| 1:02.3 | to this conversation, which, by the way, was made possible through the direct financial support |
| 1:07.5 | from our community, including on Patreon and on Substack. |
| 1:12.1 | To be honest, we were recently rejected from a significant grant opportunity, and that has |
| 1:19.3 | been making me kind of anxious about the future of the show. So, especially with Giving |
| 1:24.4 | Tuesday coming up, this is our call for help. |
| 1:32.1 | If you value our work, I invite you to support us through the ways shared at greendreamer.com slash support. |
| 1:34.9 | And as we ease into this conversation, I'd love to invite you to take some deep breaths, |
| 1:40.7 | to shelf and set aside anything that you like to set aside for now. |
| 1:47.0 | And yeah, thank you so much again for joining us. |
| 1:51.0 | I hope you enjoy this episode. |
| 1:54.6 | I think I want to start off by just sharing that food for me is very political, very historical, definitely cultural and entirely |
| 2:04.1 | environmental and more than human. But I think the act of eating itself in dominant society is |
| 2:10.8 | often reduced to just this act of like caloric intake because I feel hungry or nourishment |
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