The Taste of Love: Mum as Moral Economy, Emotional Labor, and Grassroots Livelihood in Northeastern Thailand
Keywords:
Northeastern Thai food, moral economy of food, relational-moral labor, ethics of waiting, Global South sociologyAbstract
This article examines mum, a traditional fermented sausage from Northeastern Thailand, as a social formation in which taste, love, and work are inseparably intertwined. Drawing on the case of "Legendary Love Mum of Chaiyaphum," the study addresses three objectives: (1) to analyze how taste, love, and occupation are co-constituted as a single social structure in mum production; (2) to develop the conceptual framework of the Taste of Love to extend the sociology of food and the sociology of work by recognizing taste and love as constitutive dimensions of livelihood; and (3) to open a theoretical conversation with global sociology from the standpoint of grassroots food labor in Southeast Asia. Methodologically, the study employs theoretical ethnography based on 12 months of continuous fieldwork (June 2023 – May 2024) in Mueang Chaiyaphum and Phu Khiao districts, with 15 key informants comprising five mum producers, five vendors, and five long-term consumers. Data were generated through participant observation, life-story interviews, and "taste narratives," and analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis.
The findings reveal that mum functions as (1) a narrative of love and waiting within conjugal and family life; (2) a form of work in which household and occupation are not separated, rendering the home a moral workshop of everyday ethical decision-making; (3) a food-based moral economy organized around the principle of "earning enough to live, not to accumulate," including a deliberate refusal of expansionist capitalist logics; and (4) a livelihood that does not unmake the community, sustaining family and neighborhood structures in an era of dominant rural-to-urban migration. Theoretically, the article proposes the Taste of Love framework, which integrates moral taste, love as relational-moral labor, and a food-based moral economy into a unified analytical structure. The article further introduces the concept of the ethics of waiting to challenge and complicate the European slow food paradigm from a Global South perspective. This framework contributes to global sociological debates by foregrounding the silent yet structured moral economies of grassroots food labor and arguing that love should be treated as a central analytical category in food sociology and labor studies, rather than as a residual private sentiment.
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