KILO RESTAURANTS: A BRAZILIAN SOLUTION FOR THE FRENCH IMMIGRANTS FOOD IN SALVADOR (BAHIA)

Abstract

In Salvador, many French people go to kilo restaurants for lunch. This type of place of food consumption, widely spread in Brazil and based on a self-service operation in buffet and plate weighing, allows the French immigrants to achieve the daily nutritional recommendations in their diet. Through a four-month ethnography in Salvador on the diet of French immigrants, it was possible to observe their representations of Brazilian food culture and their daily eating practices in the country of immigration. Tensions arise in the relationship between these immigrants and their daily food in Brazil. In addition to focus on these tensions, this research shows how the kilo restaurants are, for the French, places of appeasement in their relationship with food in Brazil. The kilo restaurant appears, in fact, as a space that makes it possible to negotiate the cultural norms of local food and the continuation of the nutritional recommendations disseminated in France, to which the interviewees continue to adhere.