Keep Biodiversity Alive: Constructive Values of Authentic Local Tastes

Building on actor–network theory (ANT)—a framework that examines how humans, species, technologies, and institutions form networks through which agency and meaning emerge—this study explores how heterogeneous actors collectively shape and stabilize coastal biodiversity through practices of food and taste. In coastal Japan, what counts as an “authentic local taste” is not an inherent quality but an emergent property of these networks, where ecological processes, livelihood practices, and global food infrastructures intersect. Authenticity, in this sense, is not possessed but performed: it is enacted through everyday encounters that mediate ecology, history, and labor.

Fieldwork traces three contrasting ecological assemblages with distinct configurations of actors. The first comprises long-established marine species such as abalone, sea urchins, and seaweeds, which have historically structured local ecosystems and cuisines. The second involves newly arrived warm-water species associated with ocean warming and shifts in the Kuroshio current, whose appearance unsettles existing ecological and culinary boundaries. The third focuses on farmed salmon introduced through commercial aquaculture, representing the technological and institutional reorganization of marine life for global markets. Observations and interviews reveal how performances of authenticity are enacted within and through the interactions of these three assemblages, and how they come to be perceived as “authentic local tastes.”

Taste, in this perspective, functions as a sensory interface through which people attune to biodiversity and perceive ecological change. It synchronizes embodied habits, emotional attachments, and environmental processes—moments when local actors experience the sea as a living partner in sustaining livelihoods. Authenticity thus becomes an effect of relational durability: the ongoing negotiation that allows specific ecologies and ways of life to persist as meaningful amid environmental and economic transformation.

By examining authenticity as a constitutive practice through which relational values are enacted and renewed, this study contributes to debates on biodiversity governance, value pluralism, and transformative change. It highlights that sustaining biodiversity requires not only conserving species but also maintaining the relational settings and sensory practices through which biodiversity is sensed, valued, and kept alive.