Eating Diversity, Creating Identity: Translations of the Culinary Code Between Creativity and Misunderstandings

Abstract

In contemporary societies the development of new technologies of communication and advances in transportation have caused a process of international integration and crossing, enhancing the interchange and interdependence of world views, products, economic activities, ideas, and other aspects of culture (Albrow and King in Globalization, Knowledge and Society. Sage, London, 1990; Al-Rodhan and Stoudmann in Definitions of Globalization: A Comprehensive Overview and a Proposed Definition. Program on the Geopolitical Implications of Globalization and Transnational Security. Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, 2006). Such hybridisation processes have increasingly affected food , causing the crossing and overlapping of different “foodsphere s” (Stano in Eating the Other. Translation s of the Culinary Code. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Tyne, 2015). Migrations, travels, and communications constantly expose local food identities to global food alterities, stimulating relevant processes of transformation that continuously re-shape and re-define such identities and alterities. This chapter deals with the “translation ” of the culinary code across different semiospheres, considering a specific case study in order to point out in which forms the notion of creativity emerges in food -related experiences, sometimes allowing social and cultural development within contexts of diversity and otherness, sometimes rather taking the shape of a “misunderstanding ” (La Cecla in Il malinteso. Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1997)—or even that of an irreparable “phagocytation” of differences.