The state of Yucatán has its own distinct culinary tradition, and local people are constantly thinking and talking about food. They use it as a vehicle for social relations but also to distinguish themselves from “Mexicans.” This book examines the politics surrounding regional cuisine, as the author argues that Yucatecan gastronomy has been created and promoted in an effort to affirm the identity of a regional people and to oppose the hegemonic force of central Mexican cultural icons and forms. In particular, Yucatecan gastronomy counters the homogenizing drive of a national cuisine based on dominant central Mexican appetencies and defies the image of Mexican national cuisine as rooted in indigenous traditions. Drawing on post-structural and postcolonial theory, the author proposes that Yucatecan gastronomy - having successfully gained a reputation as distinct and distant from ‘Mexican’ cuisine - is a bifurcation from regional culinary practices. However, the author warns, this leads to a double, paradoxical situation that divides the nation: while a national cuisine attempts to silence regional cultural diversity, the fissures in the project of a homogeneous regional identity are revealed.

The state of Yucatán has its own distinct culinary tradition, and local people are constantly thinking and talking about food. They use it as a vehicle for social relations but also to distinguish themselves from "Mexicans." This book examines the politics surrounding regional cuisine, as the author argues that Yucatecan gastronomy has been created and promoted in an effort to affirm the identity of a regional people and to oppose the hegemonic force of central Mexican cultural icons and forms. In particular, Yucatecan gastronomy counters the homogenizing drive of a national cuisine based on dominant central Mexican appetencies and defies the image of Mexican national cuisine as rooted in indigenous traditions. Drawing on post-structural and postcolonial theory, the author proposes that Yucatecan gastronomy - having successfully gained a reputation as distinct and distant from 'Mexican' cuisine - is a bifurcation from regional culinary practices. However, the author warns, this leads to a double, paradoxical situation that divides the nation: while a national cuisine attempts to silence regional cultural diversity, the fissures in the project of a homogeneous regional identity are revealed.

This book examines the history, archaeology, and anthropology of Mexican taste. Contributors analyze how the contemporary identity of Mexican food has been created and formed through concepts of taste, and how this national identity is adapted and moulded through change and migration.wing on case studies with a focus on Mexico, but also including Israel and the United States, the contributors examine how local and national identities, the global market of gastronomic tourism, and historic transformations in trade, production, the kitchen space and appliances shape the taste of Mexican food and drink. Chapters include an exploration of the popularity of Mexican beer in the United States by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, an examination of the experience of eating chapulines in Oaxaca by Paulette Schuster and Jeffrey H. Cohen, an investigation into transformations of contemporary Yucatecan gastronomy by Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz, and an afterword from Richard Wilk. Together, the contributors demonstrate how taste itself is shaped through a history of social and cultural practices.

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of “local taste” in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.

How does food restore the fragmented world of migrants and the displaced? What similar processes are involved in challenging, maintaining or reinforcing divisions between groups coexisting in the same living place? Food Identities at Home and on the Move examines how ‘home’ is negotiated around food in the current worldwide context of uncertainty, mobility and displacement. Drawing on empirical approaches to heritage, identity and migration studies, the contributors analyse the relationship between food and the various understandings of home and dwelling. With case studies on sushi around the world, food as heritage in the Afghan diaspora and Mexican foodways in Chicago, these chapters offer novel readings on the convergence of food and migration studies, the anthropology of space and place and the field of mobility by focusing on how entangled stories of food and home are put on display for constructing the present and imagining the future.

Food - its cultivation, preparation and communal consumption - has long been considered a form of cultural heritage. A dynamic, living product, food creates social bonds as it simultaneously marks off and maintains cultural difference. In bringing together anthropologists, historians and other scholars of food and heritage, this volume closely examines the ways in which the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food is used to create identity claims of 'cultural heritage' on local, regional, national and international scales. Contributors explore a range of themes, including how food is used to mark insiders and outsiders within an ethnic group; how the same food's meanings change within a particular society based on class, gender or taste; and how traditions are 'invented' for the revitalization of a community during periods of cultural pressure. Featuring case studies from Europe, Asia and the Americas, this timely volume also addresses the complex processes of classifying, designating, and valorizing food as 'terroir,' 'slow food,' or as intangible cultural heritage through UNESCO. By effectively analyzing food and foodways through the perspectives of critical heritage studies, this collection productively brings two overlapping but frequently separate theoretical frameworks into conversation.

What do deep fried mars bars, cod, and Bulgarian yoghurt have in common? Each have become symbolic foods with specific connotations, located to a very specific place and country. This book explores the role of food in society as a means of interrogating the concept of the nation-state and its sub-units, and reveals how the nation-state in its various disguises has been and is changing in response to accelerated globalisation. The chapters investigate various stages of national food: its birth, emergence, and decline, and why sometimes no national food emerges. By collecting and analysing a wide range of case studies from countries including Portugal, Mexico, the USA, Bulgaria, Scotland, and Israel, the book illustrates ways in which various social forces work together to shape social and political realities concerning food. The contributors, hailing from anthropology, history, sociology and political science, investigate the significance of specific food cultures, cuisines, dishes, and ingredients, and their association with national identity. In so doing, it becomes clearer how these two things interact, and demonstrates the scope and direction of the current study of food and nationalism.