The Emergence of National Food

Reviews / Votes

The Emergence of National Food is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the complex relationship between food and identity. [C]ollectively the contributors establish the critical roles played by geography and culture, and how actors from across the socio-economic spectrum participate in discourses of national cuisine and identity. * Food, Culture & Society * The essays in this interdisciplinary collection interrogate how the history of a nation can be found in the history of its diet. The editors discuss three historical theories of defining nationhood and relate them to the concept of national cuisines. The framework of [these] historical theories explains how no one theory can be comprehensive in connecting food culture to nationhood. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students. * CHOICE * This book might have been titled Invented Food Traditions, as it's redolent of the seminal volume edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in 1983 that laid bare the labour that went into making national traditions. Here we see a not dissimilar type of labour cooking up all manner of national foods and cuisines. The present volume reminds us of the humble, utilitarian, and decidedly non-national origins of food before showing how layer upon layer of national meaning are ladled upon it to concoct new, and thereafter cherished, national cuisines. At the same time, the book displays a refreshing sensitivity to the way the consumers of these national cuisines steadfastly testify to their supposedly intrinsic national origins. Approaching their topic in different empirical and historical contexts, from multiple theoretical standpoints and disciplinary perspectives, and with an array of methodological tools (or perhaps utensils?), the contributors to this volume capture the symbolic struggles in the kitchen of the nation where food is made national. * Jon Fox, Professor of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK * This volume is a welcome addition to scholarship on the contested formation of national culinary identities. Its strength is its wide-ranging geographic coverage of contemporary case studies of national food, particularly from smaller or lesser-known culinary regions, including salt cod in Portugal, potica (leavened bread) in Slovenia, poutine (fries, cheese curds, and gravy) in Quebec, yoghurt in Bulgaria, haggis and deep-fried Mars Bars in Scotland, or pa amb tomaquet (bread rubbed with tomato) in Catalonia. These studies of national food as a unifying force are balanced by equally compelling examinations of its marked absence, whether in Ecuador, Ghana, Costa Rica, Chile, Israel, or the United States. Wherever one goes, food and nation are always on the menu. * Michelle King, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA * This book offers a wide variety of exciting case studies that will close a gap in research on nationalism and food. * Katharina Vester, American University, USA *