"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."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

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.

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.

This book is a collection of research focusing on the anthropological aspects of how food is made in modern society from both global and local perspectives. Modern food consumed in any society is created in a variety of natural and cultural environments. There is a "food democracy" in which how we procure and share food can be an indicator of our participation in society, while food nurtured in particular climates and land can be transmitted to the outside world owing to the influence of tourism and the global economy, a phenomenon that is recognized on a global scale as exemplified by the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. In other words, food is an aspect of both culture and civilization. Anthropological approaches are used to reveal the humanistic aspects of food, highlighting the strength and individuality of regional and ethnic foods in global civilizations. The book is a compilation of results from sessions of the international symposium “Making Food in Human and Natural History”, which took place on March 18 and 19, 2019, in Osaka, Japan.

Capturing the important place and power role that culture plays in the decision-making process of migration, this Handbook looks at human movement outside of a vacuum; taking into account the impact of family relationships, access to resources, and security and insecurity at both the points of origin and destination.

"In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world. Pilcher is particularly enlightening on what the history of Mexican food reveals about the uneasy relationship between globalization and authenticity. The burritos and taco shells that many people think of as Mexican were actually created in the United States. But Pilcher argues that the contemporary struggle between globalization and national sovereignty to determine the authenticity of Mexican food goes back hundreds of years. During the nineteenth century, Mexicans searching for a national cuisine were torn between nostalgic "Creole" Hispanic dishes of the past and French haute cuisine, the global food of the day. Indigenous foods were scorned as unfit for civilized tables. Only when Mexican American dishes were appropriated by the fast food industry and carried around the world did Mexican elites rediscover the foods of the ancient Maya and Aztecs and embrace the indigenous roots of their national cuisine"--

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.

"A Taste of Power is an investigation of the crucial role culinary texts and practices played in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies since the founding of the United States. Nutritional advice and representations of food and eating, including cookbooks, literature, magazines, newspapers, still life paintings, television shows, films, and the internet, have helped throughout American history to circulate normative claims about citizenship, gender performance, sexuality, class privilege, race, and ethnicity, while promising an increase in cultural capital and social mobility to those who comply with the prescribed norms. The study examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, as points of cultural resistance against hegemonic norms, especially in shaping dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect mother. Cookbooks, as a low-prestige literary form, became the largely unheralded vehicles for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women even in the kitchen, and for Lesbian authors to reinscribe themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. The book engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture."--Provided by publisher.

Connections between what people eat and who they are--between cuisine and identity--reach deep into Mexican history, beginning with pre-Columbian inhabitants offering sacrifices of human flesh to maize gods in hope of securing plentiful crops. This cultural history of food in Mexico traces the influence of gender, race, and class on food preferences from Aztec times to the present and relates cuisine to the formation of national identity. The metate and mano, used by women for grinding corn and chiles since pre-Columbian times, remained essential to preparing such Mexican foods as tamales, tortillas, and mole poblano well into the twentieth century. Part of the ongoing effort by intellectuals and political leaders to Europeanize Mexico was an attempt to replace corn with wheat. But native foods and flavors persisted and became an essential part of indigenista ideology and what it meant to be authentically Mexican after 1940, when a growing urban middle class appropriated the popular native foods of the lower class and proclaimed them as national cuisine.