Abstract

Food has always operated in circulation between the local and the global, migration and resettlement and, with its power in defining and performing social meanings, served to construct notions of home and cultural otherness. But while previous studies emphasized these oppositions, our globalized and postcolonial setting today poses a new question: what happens to eating culture when the pure products go crazy? This transdisciplinary volume therefore draws on research in social anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, literature, film and cultural studies to investigate practices, representations and functions of food in American, European and Asian societies and their cross-cultural engagements. It argues that foodways precisely come to mark the material basis for both the identification and the translatability of cultures.