CHAPTER 9 - How We Consume New Products: The Example of Exotic Foods (1930–2000)

Abstract

This chapter discusses various consumers' behavior toward consumption of new products. The consumption of new foodstuffs takes place in a particular national context, revealing the historical influence of gastronomy, as influenced by the colonization of a country, immigration flow, and tourist migrations, resulting in the introduction of foreign foods and a stream of new products. Promoting the consumption of poorly known foods is not easy. In consequence, various processes can be used to introduce foreign culinary practices. These include processes aimed at replacing the practices within a familiar framework: strategies of substitution and processes of selection and recombining of foreign practices, establishing proximity between the national food habits and foreign ones. Through exoticism, the national cooking becomes richer and foreign habits may appear better than the national food. Culinary innovation is then integrated all the more easily but only if there are prestigious and positive connotations and if it is neither too unknown nor too familiar.