Cuisine

Cuisine is an important manifestation of the impact of globalization on cultural practices. Defined as a style of cooking, cuisine is a boundary-marking mechanism for different societies, demarcating “us” from “them.” Margaret Mead asserted that “food habits are seen as the culturally standardized set of behaviors in regard to food manifested who have been reared within a given cultural tradition” (Mead, 1943, p. 21). Foodways in general are a highly revealing lens through which to examine the diversity of human social formations and cultural practices.

Everybody must eat, so the production, consumption, and exchange of food are the most basic economic activities for families throughout the world and shared social activities in all cultures. As Claude Levi-Strauss has asserted, cuisine as a subset of foodways is perhaps the most basic of cultural activities, where nature is transformed (from raw food item) into a cultural artifact (cooked or prepared food).

Moreover, food production, exchange, and consumption are crucial to contemporary global political and economic issues. Solving food insecurity is listed as the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a situation that is paradoxical given the world's production capabilities; indeed, 1998 Nobel Prize–winner Amartya Sen's conclusion of the primary source of famine as human, and not as natural, underscores that while humans have had the technological ability to feed the world, they have not had the social and political will to solve global hunger. Food production and consumption have also become central in many different topics of environmental debate—from issues of access to clean food and water and the use of agricultural inputs to the introduction of genetically modified organisms and its possible ecological impact.

The influence of cuisine illustrates the central paradox of globalization. Although globalization seems to homogenize cultural practices, as societies seem to be converging toward what Benjamin Barber (1995, p. 9) refers to as the “numbing and neutering uniformities of industrial modernization and the colonizing culture of McWorld,” it is also resulting in the resurgence and power of local cultures and traditions. From a cursory examination of the spread of different particular national and regional cuisines (and the accompanying cookbooks and cooking shows), it is clear that the local also transforms the global. Cuisine gives us a platform from which to observe how people in different areas of the world, in contrasting social contexts and historical experiences, are cooking up different solutions to the challenges presented by globalization.