Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage

Ronda L. Brulotte is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and faculty affiliate with the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. Michael A. Di Giovine is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a member of the American Anthropological Association's Task Force on Cultural Heritage.

"How can something as perishable as food become a concrete connection with the past? This imaginative and sophisticated collection of case studies shows us how cuisines can both unite and divide people, connecting daily routine meals with lofty ideals of nationality and global citizenship. It is full of convincing evidence that communities are not just imagined, they are also eaten." - Richard Wilk, Indiana University, USA"This path-breaking collection examines cuisine and cultural heritage as they create and reinforce culinary identities across shifting planes of local, national, and transnational contexts. The essays, by leading specialists in food studies as well as by young scholars, focus on the US, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Slovenia, Spain, France, and Germany, as well as on UNESCO’s role in promoting cultural heritage movements. An appetizing world tour of culinary heritage, and a must-read for serious food specialists." - Ted Bestor, Harvard University, USA and author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World "This is an excellent book. For those with an interest in food, heritage and tourism (separately and combined), it is a valuable academic text; for everyone else, it is still valuable as an important read. ... The book comprises an introduction by the authors and then 14 case studies from different parts of the world: one from Asia, two from South America, three from North America and seven from Europe, as well as a chapter looking at the work of UNESCO. ... What I really liked about the book was the passion and insight exhibited within each of the chapters." - Sean Beer, in Journal of Heritage Tourism"'The unifying thread throughout the book is the paramount importance of preserving food as cultural heritage and as ancestral knowledge as a representation of the maintenance and restoration of physical, cultural, and spiritual well-being. When food rituals are properly performed, they unite us with our heritage, our community, and our planet." - Annals of Tourism Research"I highly recommend this volume for classroom use and beyond. It is a significant contribution to scholarship in cultural studies, history, political science, anthropology, folklore, food studies, and any other field concerned with the state of the world today. It is an admirable and useful demonstration of the observation made by the editors that "Through the materiality of ethnic food and food-based experiences, complex, difficult-to-articulate problems and prejudices can find expression" (p. 9)."- Journal of Anthropological Research Lucy M. Long, Center for Food and Culture, Bowling Green, Ohio"I found Brulotte and Di Giovine’s book to be an exciting journey into the realm of food and heritage, politics and practices, identity and rebellion in the face of change through immigration, commodification and globalization. … I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between tradition, as a part of authenticity, and innovation, as a requisite for market differentiation, as well as the nature of constructed identity as it relates to local/global food and/or heritage tourism studies." - Sue Slocum, George Mason University, Hospitality and Society

• Contents: Introduction: food and foodways as cultural heritage, Michael A. Di Giovine and Ronda L. Brulotte; Re-inventing a tradition of invention: entrepreneurialism as heritage in American artisan cheesemaking, Heather Paxson; Terroir in D.C.? Inventing food traditions for the nation's capital, Warren Belasco; Of cheese and ecomuseums: food as cultural heritage in the northern Italian Alps, Cristina Grasseni; Edible authenticities: heirloom vegetables and culinary heritage in Kyoto, Japan, Greg de St. Maurice; The everyday as extraordinary: revitalization, religion, and the elevation of cucina casareccia to heritage cuisine in Pietrelcina, Italy, Michael A. Di Giovine; Take the chicken out of the box: demystifying the sameness of African American culinary heritage in the U.S., Psyche Williams-Forson; Caldo De Piedra and claiming pre-Hispanic cuisine as cultural heritage, Ronda L. Brulotte and Alvin Starkman; Hallucinating the Slovenian way: the myth of Salamander Brandy, an indigenous Slovenian psychedelic drug, Miha Kozorog; Haute traditional cuisines: how UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage links the cosmopolitan to the local, Clare A. Sammells; Reinventing edible identities: Catalan cuisine and Barcelona’s market halls, Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes, Manel Guàrdia Bassols and José Luis Oyón Bañales; French chocolate as intangible cultural heritage, Susan Terrio; Daily bread, global distinction? The German bakers’ craft and cultural value-enhancement regimes, Regina F. Bendix; The Mexican and transnational lives of corn: technological, political, edible object, Erick Castellanos and Sarah Bergstresser; Cultural heritage in food activism: local and global tensions, Carole Counihan; Index.