Food as a Cultural Text Ethnography of Local Food Culture in Babol City

For thousands of years, humans have experienced various biological and cultural changes to satisfy their food needs in order to ensure their survival on the planet. Food is a permanent and meaning-making field for human interactions, that is, something more than a means of survival. In the anthropological literature, production and processing, distribution and consumption of food are considered to be the main elements of the culture of any community.Food binds the personality of individuals and the identity of groups and becomes an important tool for social communication and understanding. Food has a place in culture that connects human communities to each other and connects deep human beings to each other and plays an essential role in all meaningful andidentity-giving actions of humans.Food culture is the source of identity and cultural and natural heritage of each region.Due to the age and vast geographic-cultural diversity in Iran, a great treasure of knowledge related to local food systems in different climatic and cultural habitats has been create.In this article, an attempt has been made to depict the local food culture in one of the important cities of Mazandaran province, namely Babol, using ethnographic field research.