Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The nine articles and afterword by the noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns, and explore curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants. The perspectives include history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies. Regions of world encompassed in the collection include North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. This book consider movements in context, and, in so doing, complicate notions that food "shapes" culture as it crosses borders or that culture "adapts" foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By studying closely the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific communities of consumption they create, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local to be a dynamic, co-creative one jointly facilitated by humans and nature. This book was originally published as a special issue of Food & Foodways.

Benjamin N. Lawrance is the Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair of International Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa (2012), Locality, Mobility, and 'Nation' (2007), Interpreters, Intermediaries and Clerks (2006), and The Ewe of Togo and Benin (2006). Carolyn de la Pea is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of California at Davis, USA. Her most recent book is Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda (2010).