Foodways, 'Foodism,' or 'Foodscapes': Navigating the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides

Abstract

The term foodways has emerged from the intersection of popular and scholarly literature about cuisine to account for everything about eating, including what we consume, how we acquire it, who prepares it, and who is at the table. In the words of Patricia Harris, David Lyon, and Sue McLaughlin, foodways, as a concept, summons to mind “[o]ur attitudes, practices, and rituals around food” and offers a “window onto our most basic beliefs about the world and ourselves.” Robert Blair St. George has described foodways as a form of vernacular expression with autoethnographic dimensions.

This essay uses the term “foodways” primarily as a critical lens to explore trans-cultural, trans-national, and trans-regional mobility, locality, and local embeddedness of foodstuffs. Our focus on global foodways explores local dynamics of global food and drink production, consumption, and mobility in a more expansive trans-locational context. The food and drink subjects are broadly representative of a variety of cultural and social movements around the globe, namely migration, settlement, colonization, imperialism, race and identity, consumption, distribution, governmentality, and globalization. Sites and processes include the transplanting and importation of food crops and animals from one region of the world to another; the hybridization of foodstuffs; the dissemination of technologies of food production; the creation of recipes and beverages for a global market; the shift in consumption patterns as echoes of modernity and post-modernity; and the relationship between food, drink, and political change.

Keywords: Food, cuisine, globalization, trans-cultural, drink, foodways, locality, culture, ethnography