Palatable nationalism: A study of American cuisine through Gourmet food writing

Abstract

What is American food? How do we come to know what it is, and what discursive processes shape its boundaries? We document contradictions in American nationalism from the writing in gourmet magazines. First, we take up the oft-heard assertion that there is no American “cuisine” (Mintz, 1996). In contrast to consumption-based understandings of cuisine, we argue that American cuisine is a cultural construction that is discursively produced as part of an “imagined” American community (Anderson, 1983). The production occurs through the mass media, including gourmet food writing, visual images, and culinary television. Second, we investigate the quality and tone of American culinary nationalism drawing from a sample of food writing and visual images in gourmet magazines. We contend that American gastronomy produces a particular brand of nationalism that is palatable to food elites and social elites alike. In particular, an American culinary nationalism tends to minimize class distinctions and erase the historical divides of race and ethnicity. In addition, the American culinary identity has a highly problematic relationship to the ‘Other’, whereby colonial and neo-colonial inequalities are obscured from view, and absorbed into a multi-cultural food identity where a love of good food is presented as the great social leveler.