Food heritage and nationalism in Europe

Abstract

This introductory chapter focuses on the construction of food as heritage, and on the powerful entanglements of food, heritage and nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on the rich, interdisciplinary and global scholarship of the past 20 years, it provides a broad European picture. It covers the recent food wars and the uses and misuses of food in banal nationalism, as well as its abuses in the mixophobic nationalism of European populist movements. Food nationalism has been marked by ethnicity and is highly gendered. Women wrote cookery books which provided an all-pervasive approach, widely upheld by middle-class families, leading to national styles of cooking. Yet writing about national cooking tended to be based on the invented traditions of an unreflective nationalism, failing to acknowledge the long, entangled history of exchanges and transfers in food and the way it was cooked. The Columbian exchange was but one of many instances of translation, connection and hybridization. Empires, migrations, diasporas and exiles, as well as globalization, brought not only new produce, but also new ideas of cookery which reshaped ways of cooking and eating all over Europe and beyond.