What counts as “quality” in agrarian taste? Subjectivities, gender, and rice agroecology in northern Bangladesh

Abstract

This ethnographic study explores perceptions of the quality or goodness of rice among two agrarian communities in northern Bangladesh. In Bangladeshi rice markets, socio-cultural perceptions of the appearance and texture of rice are seen to determine the quality and taste of rice. This paper foregrounds the invisible actors—the embodied ways of knowing and practicing of rural agrarian workers—to unravel how they perceive, appreciate, and interpret the quality of rice across gendered and classed body politics. Evidence from the practical and relational aspects of their eating habits suggests that the eater's sensory experience of quality and tastiness is grounded on how the rice grains are grown and processed. Qualification is a continuous process that awakens the eating body's active participation in the experience of cooking, eating, and metabolism. By introducing the idea of agrarian taste, this study presents a new way of understanding how rural agrarian workers preserve the complex and rhizomatic embodied knowledge on the authenticity and adulteration of the qualities of rice and brings new insight into the scholarship of food, nutrition, agriculture, and the environment.