Food and Glocalization

Since ancient times, long-distance trade has enabled the spread of both staple foods and luxury products, such as wine, tea, coffee, rice, spices and dried fish (Nützenadel & Trentmann, 2008). Colonial expansion further enlarged food markets, linking distant places and cultures of the world, until the so-called contemporary ‘globalization’, in which the multiple modes of interaction of the economic, political, social and cultural spheres ‘affect food-related matters, and … the latter in turn come to affect the former, in a series of ongoing dialectical relations characterized by the constant generation of forms of complexity’ (Inglis & Gimlin, 2009, p. 9). Such processes do not merely involve food products, but also – and especially –practices (of preparation and consumption), habits, rites, systems of valorization, as well as images of one’s self (that is to say, the construction of local and national identities, and self-understanding of social and cultural groups) and of others (for example, migrants, ethnic communities and travellers). And they are frequently marked by unevenness and incompleteness, as they entail changing cultural, social and economic hierarchies, which constantly redefine the boundaries between groups and nations, identities and alterities (Geyer & Paulmann, 2001, p. 6). Thus, while some scholars have emphasized the homogenization resulting from the process of food globalization (see, in particular, Ritzer, 1993, 2003, 2004), others have instead stressed the huge heterogeneity (Poulain, 2002) and hybridity (Appadurai, 1990) originating from it, especially as a result of a process of confrontation of the global dimension with localized food styles and, conversely, of ways of living local lives with and through global imagery. Furthermore, as Jean-Loup Amselle (2001) interestingly remarks, all societies are crossbred even within themselves: building on James Clifford’s concept of traveling cultures (1997) and the studies carried out by Ulf Hannerz (1987, 1992) and Édouard Glissant (1990 [1997]) on the idea of creolization, the French anthropologist strongly criticizes a conception of globalization as a collision among previously pure and intact elements, instead defining it as the encounter among already hybridized and heterogeneous systems, which relies precisely on the confrontation between the global and the local dimension. In glocalized societies, therefore, ‘the blurring of global and local distinctions causes established meanings and authenticities to be no longer broadly defined but rather expressed through myriad interpretations’ (Matejowsky, 2007, p. 37). This essay shows how food is particularly susceptible to this process of ‘blurring’, and can therefore play a crucial role in understanding its functioning mechanisms and effects of meaning.