See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/289126553

The world on a plate: Globalization and national cuisines

Article  in  Quaderni storici · December 2006

CITATION READS

1 977

1 author:

Simone Cinotto
Università degli Studi di Torino
19 PUBLICATIONS   72 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Simone Cinotto on 07 December 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

60 RESEARCH S I M O N E C I N OTTO _ U N I V E R S I T Y O F T U R I N
National Cuisines
and Globalization
These days national cuisine and
globalization are defined as terms in
opposition to each other. The former is
frequently used to exemplify and often
criticize the effects of the latter. The media
have popularized the image of national
cuisines as an important part of the
identities which a huge blender called
globalization contaminates, weakens and
Photo: Simona Tonna
threatens with extinction. It is no
coincidence that the arrival of McDonald’s
in France created considerable uproar. What
else could be so culturally dramatic? On the
one hand, there is a culinary heritage,
with an apparently immemorial past,
which constitutes an essential component
Culinary globalization is a recently popularized label,
describing only the latest, conspicuous phase in the formation
of transnational interdependencies which have been in
existence for many centuries
of national identity. On the other hand, a
meal of a hamburger, French fries and Coca-
Cola, symbolic of the uniformity of taste,
overriding and breaking down barriers and
differences in the name of a consumer
democratization which is typically North
American, but can be used all over the world
as a form of universal language (Fantasia).
It is not only the monotonous element of
fast-food that is of concern. The arrival
on our supermarket shelves of an
unprecedented variety of foods from foreign
lands, available throughout the year, has
thrown into confusion the space-time
regime of a cuisine that believed itself to be
linked directly to its territory and the
changing seasons. According to one
influential critic of contemporary society,
“The whole world’s cuisine is now assembled
in one place in almost exactly the same way
that the world’s geographical complexity is
nightly reduced to a series of images on a
static television screen” (Harvey 300).
Nonetheless, when the subject is examined
from a historical perspective–that is, if the
terms in question are considered not as self-
referential entities but as processes–it is
immediately evident that such a description
is excessively simplistic. From this
perspective, national cuisines are revealed as
cultural constructs in continuous evolution.
Globalization then appears as a recently
popularized label which describes only the
latest, conspicuous phase in the formation
of transnational interdependencies which
have been in existence for many centuries.
Consequently, our interest is concentrated
on the complex nature of the relationships
between national cuisines and globalization,
rather than on their conflicting elements.
In support of this last perspective, in this
article I shall examine various examples of
research on the subject, in an attempt to
answer the following questions: What is
national cuisine? What are the influential
formal and symbolic changes occurring at
the beginning of the 21st century?
Furthermore, and more radically: Is there
still any point in talking about national
cuisine in an era of global markets, mass
migrations, the unlimited circulation of
images and information and an accelerated
cultural crossbreeding?
What is national cuisine?
Cooking occupies an important place in
national sentiments at all latitudes. Many
will agree that having a national cuisine is
no less essential to a country than having a
national literature. However the real content
of what makes a “national cuisine” is also
elusive and intangible. What does Chinese
62 RESEARCH SIMONE CINOTTO
Photo: Simona Tonna
The unified identity of a national cuisine is expressed
when products and methods abandon the field of individual
consumption and venture into the global
dynamics of commerce
cooking effectively consist of? Where can
one eat real Italian cooking?
In an essay significantly entitled Cuisine:
High, Low, and Not at All, the American
anthropologist Sidney Mintz amused
himself with a demonstration of what a
national cuisine is not. Primarily, national
cuisine is not regional cuisine, which
according to Mintz is the only kind that can
be designated cuisine. In order to exist, “a
cuisine requires a population that eats that
cuisine with sufficient frequency to
consider themselves experts on it... A
genuine cuisine has common social roots; it
is the food of a community,” with its roots
in a clearly circumscribed territory (96).
Consequently an authentic cuisine can be at
the very most regional, but never national.
Secondly, says Mintz, national cuisine is
something completely different from haute
cuisine, which is a repertoire of culinary
arts and the prerogative of privileged
groups, created centuries before the
formation of nation-states. In the West,
examples are to be found in the culture of
Ancient Rome and the highest expressions
of court cuisines from the Renaissance to
the French Revolution. Over a thousand
years ago in China a highly refined
gastronomic literature served the
sophisticated requirements of the Imperial
Court. However pre-industrial haute
cuisine was, by its very nature, universalist
and removed from its territorial context as
well as elitist. It was more global than
national, importing ingredients, techniques
and chefs from faraway lands, expressing
its haughty indifference to local specialties
or seasonal cycles. In his history of taste in
Great Britain and France from the Middle
Ages to today, Stephen Mennell has noted
that until the 19th century there were
much stronger differences between the
elitist and popular cuisines within the two
countries than between their respective
hautes cuisines.
The only occasion in which Mintz doesn’t
regard the definition of national cuisine a
contradiction in terms is when concerned
with “traveling cuisine,” in other words the
experience of a culinary culture from the
outside: “If there were a restaurant in Des
Moines, Iowa, named Gerbe de Blé or Les
Gaulois, that vaunted a menu in both French
and English, offered to prepare for its guests
 RESEARCH 63

the drink called kir, used sauces such as Class (36). A British anthropologist, Goody
béarnaise and grenobloise, served snails or has effectively concentrated his attention on
some sort of pâté as a first course, and had a the stratified societies of the pre-industrial
wine list with at least some wines from era, identifying in types of food not so
Bourdeaux on it, we would know what kind much as a division among classes, as does
of cuisine it has. French, of course–what Mintz, but of dialectics. From this historic
else?” (95). According to Mintz it is perspective, Goody also illustrates the role
exclusively within the dimension of of food technologies (preservation,
“exportation from its home territory” that mechanization, sales and transport systems)
the acceptance of a national cuisine has any in fostering the spread of both quantity and
sense. variety of foodstuffs and a more egalitarian
Reasoning along these lines is widely distribution of food. The interaction
accepted. In Italian Cuisine: A Cultural between social classes can promote a
History, Alberto Capatti and Massimo consensus around gastronomic standards.
Montanari have identified in “a network of Technological progress produces greater
culinary customs, food lore, and cooking amounts and more diversity of food and
practices, dating back to the distant past, thereby stimulates society’s interest in
that make explicit reference to an Italian questions regarding food culture. It is
context” the historic element providing a through these interdependent and necessary
form of cohesion and logic to a cultural map processes that the social basis for the
punctuated by mortadella (a large spiced creation of a national cuisine can be
pork sausage) from Bologna, Milanese established. Goody ultimately insists that
ossibuchi (braised shank) and triglie alla no food system is (or has been) completely
livornese (red mullet in a tomato sauce). uncontaminated, particularly those cur-
According to Capatti and Montanari, the rently recognized as national or regional
unified identity of Italian cooking is cuisines. Both the tea and sugar of English
expressed on the outer boundaries of traditions are products of the colonies,
individual food cultures, when products and initially reserved for consumption by the
methods abandon the field of individual
consumption and venture into the global
dynamics of commerce. The Italian
character of its cuisine has settled first, and
above all, in the expressions of “a foreigner
in a foreign country” (ix, xv). Similarly,
Penny van Esterik has noted that the most
organic form of Thai cuisine is the one
currently popularized on the international
market by Thai restaurants abroad and by
the tourist resorts operating in the country
itself, constructed through a combination of
haute and popular cooking, regional
variations and culinary traditions with both
Indian and Chinese origins.
It is this exchange, both internal between
haute cuisine and popular cooking, and
external, which is the main theme of Jack
Goody’s classic work, Cooking, Cuisine, and
64 RESEARCH SIMONE CINOTTO
elite and only subsequently popularized.
Photo: José Carlos Redón
“Irish” potatoes came from America and
were reluctantly incorporated into the diet
of the island’s inhabitants only halfway
through the 18th century. Pasta arrived in
Italy from Arab North Africa in the 15th
century, whilst the typical Venetian dish of
polenta e baccalà (cooked cornmeal and
dried cod) was invented by putting together
a ground American cereal with a fish from
the North Sea which arrived in Italy already
processed.
Goody shows how in complex social
systems, cuisines–including those claiming
the title of national cuisines–are the result of
interactions between domestic and public,
high and low, local and foreign, using
different processes, context by context, with
economic, technological and political
variations. Historians concerned with the
appearance of national cuisines have
typically added to this model a close
examination of the textuality of the cultural-
nationalist discourse (an aspect ignored by
Mintz, who was completely absorbed, as
shown, by the significance of social
practices). An excellent example can be
found in Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s
essay on the nationalization of French
cuisine. Ferguson claims that at the
beginning of the 19th century a number of
authoritative texts such as the Almanach des
Gourmands by Grimod de la Reynière, L’art
de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle
by Antonin Carême and Physiologie du goût
by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin not only
invented gastronomy as a modern social
practice, but were also crucial for the
development of culinary nationalism.
France’s reputation as the cradle of good
cooking considerably pre-dated the 19th
century, but such recognition had neither
a geographic-territorial character nor
anything like a national one, its ambit being
the court and the French aristocracy. These
works by the founding fathers of
gastronomy identified in the French nation
and in its socially cross-cutting repertoire of
products, knowledge and culture the home
of a superior culinary civilization. They did
not predict the impenetrable isolation of
French cuisine but, on the contrary, the
opportunity of appropriating external
elements for itself. These would be absorbed
through a process of “Frenchifying,” in other
words through the inclusion of the various
contributions within the strict rules that the
texts themselves had managed to
standardize and structure. By co-opting the
numerous local culinary elements spread
over the territory, gastronomic nationalism
was a perfect example of the “invention of
traditions.” On the one hand, the new so-
called French cuisine imposed an idea of the
cultural superiority of the rules and values
of the center over the periphery, absolutely
essential to entrench the power of the
newly created Republic. On the other
hand, it was able to promote many other
types of cuisine with a Romantic-sounding
approach, assimilating them as subordinate
elements of an exemplary shining and
glorious whole, in a “perfect compendium of
66 RESEARCH SIMONE CINOTTO
France itself.” French cuisine became
French in the 19th century, when the texts
and culinary authorities, structured as a
single gastronomic discourse, no longer
associated culinary arts with the court and
the aristocracy, but with the nation itself.
Contrary to their representations in the
media, national cuisines have not been
traditions since time immemorial,
impervious and integrated cultures or a pure
and compact repertoire that cannot be
tarnished or corrupted by external contact
or influences, and the same can be said for
their smaller constituents such as regional
cuisines. National cuisines are recent
creations, typically modern, whose content is
the result of exchanges and interbreeding
between the underlying realities of local and
regional environments and overhanging and
essentially universal realities. They become
systemized usually through informal
practices organized in texts in different
styles and influenced by the class, ethnic and
race relationships existing within a complex
society, inextricably linked to a much wider
discourse around national identity.
The example of Belize
The concept that globalization, seen as a
process of intense displacement of people,
capital, products, ideas and images over
great distances, is in reality one of the forces
concerned with the formation and
redefinition of national cuisines derives
from the definition given. The example of
Belize, a small country in the Caribbean
which became an independent nation-state
only in 1981, can be used to illustrate how
the relationships between national cuisine
and globalization can be better understood
when considered as connections rather than
oppositions.
The anthropologist Richard Wilk claims
that Belize’s national cuisine is an invention
created by colonization and decolonization
as a consequence of both the effects of and
as a response to the intrusion of the
multitude of external influences that have
characterized this country’s cultural history.
The first colonizers in the 17th century
were a group of pirates, merchants and
various desperados, mainly British,
traveling with a throng of African and
Indian slaves. The diet of this community,
which ignored agriculture and whose main
interest was mahogany, was largely
dependent on the importing of salt pork,
flour, sugar and rum to be exchanged for
local produce. In the 19th century, as an
intermediary group of Creoles and freed
blacks emerged alongside the white
colonizers, the ethnic framework was
further complicated by the arrival in Belize
of merchants from Mexico, Guatemalan
Maya peasants and Garifuna Indians from
the island of St Vincent. With the exception
of the newly arrived native Americans who
concentrated on subsistence farming, the
Belizeans continued to consume almost
exclusively imported goods, to such a
degree that the origin, quality and brand of
these goods led to the organization of social
identities in accordance with the imagined
geographic colonial origin of the goods.
Everyone consumed products coming from
some other part of the world. Each social
group had access to foods of different
quality on which they based their own
diet–beginning with the colonial elite who
identified their culinary distinctiveness in
their ability to select original products,
identical to those sold “at home” in Britain.
Despite this fragmentation, it was
nonetheless in the colonial period that an
initial food lexicon was created that was
shared in daily domestic practices. The
low population density made culinary
exchanges almost compulsory and a
common language with regard to food
gradually developed, together with a system
for evaluating food that rose above ethnic
and social barriers. For example, Belizeans
of different extractions all agreed on the
 RESEARCH 67

superior quality of imported products over

local ones and on the greater value of
processed foods over natural ones. Thus,
everyday Belizean cuisine of the colonial
period was never recognized as a national
cuisine while ethnic cuisines continued
quite happily to perform their symbolic
functions in the public performances of
different groups within the national system.
In the postcolonial period, the economic and
socio-cultural context of Belize changed
enormously. New Hispanic immigration
coincided with an increase in emigration to
the United States. Remittances from
immigrants have become a crucial part of
the national economy, as has tourism. Since
the 1980s, satellite television has appeared
in the country and with it a huge availability
of consumer goods and images produced by
the global cultural industry, sweeping aside
the regulatory authority of the colonial
The trajectory of Belizean cuisine demonstrates how
middle classes and replacing it with a new the result of intertwining is the creation of new gastronomic
set of values and behavioral patterns. As a
result, with the persistence of extremes of models staged for a global audience
wealth and poverty and of ethnic and racial
differences, social synergism now takes familiar dishes by carefully replacing those
place on a much more flexible and products that were difficult to find locally,
participative terrain with greater and having also appreciated the need to
possibilities of social mobility, mainly distinguish themselves on the market
linked to projects for migration to the from the ethnic cuisines of immigrants
United States. from other Caribbean countries, the
With regard to gastronomic identity, even American-Belizeans began to propose
after its political independence, there was their “national cuisine” to a multicultural
no public stance in Belize that was public. Belizean restaurants in the United
concerned with the question of a national States systematically selected dishes and
cuisine. Although the choice of a flag, meal formats from the cuisine made in
anthem and the other symbols of the nation homes in Belize. The principal meal of the
were the subject of great debate, the daily Belizean table, rice and beans,
gastronomic sphere was virtually ignored. became the inevitable main dish, served
Instead, the creation of a postcolonial with a fixed accompaniment of chicken
Belizean national cuisine came about stew, fried platanos (plantains) and potato
through utterly transnational dynamics. salad. Belizean restaurants in the United
Photo: José Carlos Redón

The Belizean immigrants in the United
States where the first to create their own
national cuisine as a formalized system
and as a public demonstration. Once they
discovered that they could reproduce
States chose a few desserts from among
the variety popular in Belize, amongst
which sweet-potato mousse and coconut
cake are ever present. For the expatriates
in the US, this cuisine served as a nostalgic
68 RESEARCH SIMONE CINOTTO
Photo: José Carlos Redón
expression of their identity, an ambiguous
regret for a country to which, in reality,
very few wished to return permanently:
“The salted pigtail you buy in Belize tastes
better than that you can get in the States
(even though the Belize item is itself
imported from Canada). The mangoes in
the United States are never as nice as the
ones on the tree in Granny’s yard” (Wilk
83). Restaurants and ethnic festivals
multiplied (Belize Day is celebrated in
Chicago every August), becoming focal
points for aggregating a community
characterized by a strongly transitional
nature and close relationships between
those who have left and those who have
remained in Belize.
The process of constructing a national
cuisine on American soil is certainly not
exclusive to the Belizean community but,
on the contrary, closely follows previous
experiences of other immigrant groups
and other culinary habits in the
diasporas–just think of the Italian-
Americans in the early 1900s.
Nonetheless, although the context of
migration and market forces of cultural
differences is the same as in the past, an
important peculiarity is provided by the
circularity of the cultural model that is
characteristic, at least in intensity, of the
transnational migrations straddling the
20th and 21st centuries. In effect, the
Belizean migrants in the United States
physically carried back home the idea of a
national cuisine that they had devised and
acquired in America. Some of them
opened Belizean restaurants in their home
country, offering a cuisine that today is
both formally and publicly presented as
“national.” In Belize, people continued to
prepare and eat Belizean food as they had
unwittingly done in the past but now
“with the idea that it was unique, special,
and part of a national identity” (Wilk 83).
The ever-growing number of international
tourists closed the circle of transnational
nationalization; by partaking of this
cuisine they felt as they were experiencing
the authentic Belizean food. It was only at
this point that the government
acknowledged the need to launch projects
promoting Belizean cuisine (sometimes
presented as the result of “a thousand
cuisines and a thousand cultures”).
The example of Belize illustrates the
complexity of the cultural, transnational
and circular threads with which today the
mass of money, products, ideas, images
and people in movement criss-cross and
modify local realities. The course of
Belizean cuisine also demonstrates how
the result of this intertwining is not a
homogeneity of tastes, customs and
consumption but the creation of new, but
completely authentic, cultural (food)
models whose differences are staged for a
potentially global audience through
communication patterns that are ever
wider and universally accepted. The
concept of Belizean cuisine is a product of
globalization (or rather of several
globalizations). The satellite TV, Internet,

cell phones and intercontinental jets that
connect Belize with the rest of the world
can be seen not so much as elements of
dissolution of a national culture that has
consistently been in a state of redefinition
and subject to a multitude of external
influences, but rather as an instrument of
a single globalization of difference.
Neo-centrifugal movements
of Japanese cuisine
In the debate surrounding the cultural
impact of globalization, the first theories
that focussed on homogenization and
cultural imperialism (frequently labeled
with neologisms from the fast-food
industry’s brand names: McDonaldization,
Coca-Colonialism) have largely left the field
to the analysis of processes in which local
difference (for example, a national cuisine)
is spread around the four corners of the
earth to a potential universe of consumers
with access to an essentially infinite amount
of products and exotic images. These global
consumers are used to eating Greek at lunch
and Indian in the evening and to self-
development through the use of products,
images and experiences that is equal to the
consumption of a vast variety of identities
and geographic differences, at the same time
a product and a formidable driving force in
the process of globalization.
Two English geographers, Ian Cook and
Philip Crang, have produced some of the
most interesting work on the subject of
the globalization of national cuisines as
the production and consumption of the
authentic and the exotic. Cook and Crang
have created, above all, a theoretical model
centered on the term displacement which
supersedes the approach of what they call
central locatable geography in culinary
culture. The currently popular assumption
is that no identity is so pure that it has never
undergone some mixing. If deconstructed
and its past examined, every single identity
RESEARCH 69
will reveal itself as a hybrid of a hybrid of a
hybrid, on into infinity. However in order to
unravel the mass of influences that have
contributed to the formation of a food
identity, usually one must chose a
determinate area for analytical engagement:
“a culture, a nation, a place, a cup of tea.”
Cook and Crang suggest a multi-localized,
no-center method of analysis in which the
particular local culinary practices and
biographies are included in a global network
Originally created in Edo (Tokyo) around the mid-19th century,
sushi has been subjected to a number of influences and local
variations as it traveled outside the borders of Japan
of geographical and human relationships
(Cook and Crang 1996 and 1998).
This model has been applied to the
globalization of Japanese cuisine (Cook and
Crang 2006). The two English geographers
claim that a single centered perspective
would only deliver the history of the
formation of a national Japanese cuisine à la
Goody in terms of various levels of
hybridization and contamination. Amongst
the food exchanges which have taken place
between Japan and the West, the effects of
the 18th-and 19th-century scientific
discourse which related the Europeans’
global economic and military hegemony to
their considerable consumption of beef
and wheat, are significantly important. At
the turn of the 19th century, a number of
European-educated Japanese military
doctors led a public opinion campaign
claiming that Japanese conscripts were
shorter than their European counterparts
because of their rice-based diet. During the
1920s the Japanese army and navy
adopted a Western diet of beef and wheat
bread. In the meantime, intellectuals,
nutritionists and restaurateurs promoted
the Japanization of Western cuisine. Results
included korokke (meat or fish croquettes),

hayashi rice (with smoked beef), tonkatsu
(breaded pork cutlets), donatsu (a donut
variant) and curry. The process of adapting
external elements to the Japanese taste took
place within a purely urban context. The
army recruits and the immigrants to the city
perceived this cuisine as both national (in
contrast to the regional cuisine they were
used to) and rich, and they adopted it with
enthusiasm. During the 1950s the
combination of this and other processes
ultimately produced a largely accepted
“Japanese cuisine” which was effectively both
hybridized and international, but which
many Japanese accepted as their own. It was
only at this point that rice, which in the
countryside had always been the prerogative
of the elite, was designated the food of all
Japanese and the format of rice plus three
(rice with soup, preserved vegetables and a
protein) was proclaimed as the national dish.
This said, Cook and Crang suggest that the
globalization of Japanese cuisine should be
considered in the light of the different
perspective provided by displacement, by
studying simultaneously, with a form of
multifocal vision, the Westernization of
the Japanese diet and the Japanization of
the Western diet. From such an analysis
emerge two fundamental characteristics of
globalized national cuisines: 1) the
transnational circularity of culinary culture
and 2) the relevance of a discourse of value
linked to the notion of authenticity which is
set out in an equally transnational totality of
narratives, representations and imaginings
that are neither obvious nor predictable.
As the two geographers point out, an
already hybridized and international
Japanese cuisine was exported at the end
of the 19th century by immigrants to the
western United States. Over time the
resulting Japanese-American cuisine
incorporated a series of innovations which
were also the result of its considerable
success as a healthy and classy cuisine–with
variations in dishes, new local names (such
RESEARCH 71
Photo: Monica Nannini
as California or Miami rolls) and the entry
into the market of other non-Japanese Asian
restaurateurs who wanted to exploit its
popularity. Between the 1970s and 80s,
British entrepreneurs and retailers brought
this Japanese-American hybrid to the United
Kingdom as Japanese cuisine and it was
introduced as an emerging trend within the
market of ethnic cuisines. With no large
population of Japanese descent in the UK,
this left the commodification of Japanese
culture almost entirely in the hands of the
British. Moreover, it was through British
capital and management that Japanese
cuisine made its appearance in Holland,
France and Germany, leading to dishes with
exotic names such as teriyaki, tempura and
sushi becoming part of the gastronomic
imagination of millions of European
consumers (Cwiertka).
The example of sushi is particularly
illustrative of the circularity of commercial
geography inherent in culinary
globalization. Originally created in Edo
(Tokyo) around the mid-19th century, sushi
has traveled outside the boundaries of Japan
as part of 20th-century Japanese cuisine in a
way substantially independent from the
Japanese diaspora. In every stage of its
international journey, from the United
States to Europe, sushi has been subjected to
a number of influences and local variations,
from the use of cooked fish and avocado in
the US, to the various vegetables and even
strawberries and cream that can be found in
the European variations. The European and
American success of franchise chains
serving sushi have been the cause of other
neo-centrifugal movements. The British
chain Yo! Sushi has opened outlets in Dubai
and Kuwait and intends shortly to open a
72
Photo: © Maurizio Milanesio
Photo: Simona Tonna
RESEARCH SIMONE CINOTTO
sushi bar in Tokyo. What image will this
present and what will be the perception of
this transnational sushi bar that brings back
home a significant element of global
Japanese culture? What about the many
Japanese tourists and expats who return
home with Westernized tastes, sensations
and judgements? How can we define this
Japanese-American-British-European
cuisine (without taking into consideration
the many other variations) that potentially
contains within it, one by one, all the
geographies of the movements and stages of
its history?
This problem of definitions is not only of
interest to those studying culinary
globalization, but also to entrepreneurs
working in the market of globalized national
cuisines. The latter, from the independent
pizzeria owner to the creative director of an
advertising campaign for a line of ethnic
foods, are consistently confronted with the
problem of both representing and
promoting the authenticity of their good, in
other words of creating the originality of its
culinary diversity, since this is the
fundamental value of what is bought and
sold on the global cultural market. Japanese
cuisine is unusual in that there are very few
non-Japanese consumers who have a first-
hand knowledge or experience of the
authentic culture in an authentic place of
production. Given the high costs of flights
and visits to Japan, most Europeans have
experienced Japanese cuisine only in their
own country or perhaps in the United
States. They express their opinions about
the value of this cuisine through a de-
territorialized standard of authenticity.
The stories about the authenticity of global
cuisines take on a geographic-cultural form,
mostly by linking places to the pure
essentials of cultural differences: Italian
cuisine inspires Mediterranean passion;
Indian cooking stands for the exotic East
and so on. Regarding Japanese cuisine, two
very different “imaginative geographies”
have been produced. The first, typical of
global Japanese restaurants, consists of a
frozen image of Japan, fixed in both time
and space, and made of bonsai, lanterns,
calligraphic signs, tatami mats and a staff of
at least apparently Japanese descent. The
second, typical of sushi-bar chains such as
Yo! Sushi, consists of an explicitly de-
territorialized, global, hyper-modern,
techno-orientalist Japanese culture that
communicates the values and behaviors of a
youthful, transnational generation. It is
expressed through the use of minimalist
decor and lighting, karaoke, Manga
cartoons, robotized equipment and an
equally young and hip staff. It is important
to note that, whilst the traditional strategy
narrates an apparent authenticity which
distinguishes the product from within the
global culinary market, the narrative model
of the sushi bar promotes the authenticity of
the global nature inherent in the product.
The hybrid and transnational dishes and the
international pop culture that provides it
with a significant outline tend to present
themselves as the original authentic, to be
sold and consumed, including and
surpassing the sum of the stories and
geographies that make up the cultural
difference which is the object of exchange.
The generic conclusions that Cook and
Crang extract from the anti-centralized
analysis of the globalization of Japanese
cuisine effectively set the scene for the
process of definition of a post-national
cuisine, thereby answering the initial
question about the fate and significance of
national cuisines and globalization better
than other theorizations.
Thus it is abundantly clear that the idea of a
national cuisine has still–and probably more
than ever before–an important meaning
from the perspectives of both identity and,
almost inseparably, economics. However, it
is equally clear that its definition is
extraordinarily complex, if all the national
cuisines existing on the global scene are

hybrids made from hybrids made from
hybrids ad infinitum and also subject to as
many subsequent hybridizations as the
potentially infinite local stages that they will
undergo in the process of globalization.
What exactly is Japanese, or for that matter
French, Indian, Mexican or Russian cuisine?
Cook and Crang’s proposal is to think of
globalized national cuisines in the same way
that postcolonial linguistic theories consider
the English language of the former British
empire. This distinguishes between English
language with a capital “E”–its own national
standard of language which should be spoken
in exactly the same way everywhere–and a
multitude of english languages with a small “e”
that vary with respect to the standard as they
take on an appropriate form for the local
context within which they are spoken. All
these english languages with a lower-case “e”
are simultaneously geographically rooted and
connected by invisible de-territorialized links.
Those who speak standard English with a
capital “E” may be very few but, nonetheless,
the existence of the standard is perpetuated.
The same can be said for global national
cuisines. The history of culinary
globalization has produced, and continues
to produce, localized and specifically
contextual versions of national cuisines
which invisible idealized threads link to the
supposedly authentic national cuisines.
Who can claim to cook and eat 100% true
and original Japanese cuisine? Who holds
the authority of authentication required to
decide to which Italian cuisine we should all
conform? An extremely small number of
people. So much so that, at the extreme, a
standard national cuisine may represent
only an abstraction but still maintains its
status as a point of reference when
compared to the multitude of other local
and contextual varieties (each with its own
special history and geography) which are
ultimately reduced to a single whole and
are interconnected by an ethereal but
substantial family air.
View publication stats
RESEARCH 73
Bibliography
Capatti, Alberto and Massimo Montanari. Italian
Cusine: A Cultural History. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
Cook, Ian and Philip Crang. “The World on a
Plate: Culinary Culture, Displacement, and
Geographical Knowledges.” Journal of Material
Culture. 1. 2 (1996).
Cook, Ian, Philip Crang and Mark Thorpe.
“Biographies and Geographies: Consumer
Understandings of the Origins of Foods.” British
Food Journal. 100. 3 (1998).
Cook, Ian and Philip Crang. “Japanese Food and
Globalisation.” Submitted to Food & Foodways.
13 July 2006.
<http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/downloads/
gesdraftpapers/iancook-cook_crang_%20intro.pdf>
Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. “From Ethnic to Hip:
Circuits of Japanese Cuisine in Europe.”
Food & Foodways. 13.4 (2005).
Fantasia, Rick. “Fast Food in France.” Theory
and Society. 24.2 (1995).
Goody, Jack. Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A
Study in Contemporary Sociology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating
and Taste in England and France from the
Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell,
1985.
Mintz, Sidney W. Tasting Food, Tasting
Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Food, and
the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla. “A Cultural Field
in the Making: Gastronomy in 19th-Century
France.” American Journal of Sociology. 104. 3
(1998)
Van Esterik, Penny. “From Marco Polo to
McDonald’s: Thai Cuisine in Transition.”
Food & Foodways. 5. 2 (1992).
Wilk, Richard. “Food and Nationalism: The
Origins of ‘Belizean Food’.” Eds. W. Belasco
and P. Scranton. Food Nations: Selling Taste in
Consumer Societies. New York: Routledge, 2002.