ABSTRACT
In collaboration with Professor Irene Coutinho de Macedo, chair of the nutrition department at Centro Universitário Senac in São Paulo, we provide a historical overview of Brazilian food patterns, identifying dishes that have risen to national prominence. We examine how Brazilians engage with food and how some national dishes have been immortalized in song. Some of the most renowned musicians in Brazil, such as Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi, Adoniran Barbosa, Djavan, Gilberto Gil, Paulinho da Viola, and Zeca Pagodinho, have composed and performed popular music about food. These poet-composers have written and recorded songs about everything from instructions for making traditional dishes, to artisanal processing of ingredients, to etiquette around food consumption. The purpose of this chapter and the next is to examine relevant Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) repertoire and to look at the kitchen as a central folk space in Brazilian culture. We analyze a few songs, providing biographical information about the composers, summaries of the texts, and suggestions of their importance in the Brazilian music scene as they introduce dishes of national prominence.
