Nationalism, Culinary Coherence, and the Case of the United States: An Empirical or Conceptual Problem?

Abstract

There is no coherent narrative, easily accessible, when addressing American national cuisine. Familiar narrative tropes of history and anthropology—continuity and change over the longue durée, a before and after analysis after a seminal political or economic event, the tireless burden of one group or the status benefits of another—can address elements but do not really help to connect the dots or create a definitive road map. There may not be a ‘there’ there, no evident system that integrates identity (American) with culinary practices (shared ingredients, techniques, and dishes). Without a clearly identifiable set of components and with no clear mode of integration, does it, in fact exist? It could not be said of the United States, though, that her vast geography has never been integrated through national projects from the concrete to the abstract: parks, roadways, and bridges, public education, military might. Perhaps, though, the problem of a national cuisine for the United States lies in the necessary reliance on the everyday acts of its citizens as much as the explicit efforts of the nation-state in order for its existence. As in the question, if you build it, will they come, what about if everyone does not make the same food or identify the food they make as uniquely American, does a national cuisine exist? The problem, then, might be one of culture not of politics. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson defines cuisine as a “cultural construct that systematizes culinary practices and transmutes the spontaneous culinary gesture into a stable cultural code” (2004: 3). She uses this definition to help explain the strength and solidity of French cuisine, arguably a world-renowned national cuisine, one, as she points out, embedded in the initial development of the French nation; the stories of the acts of revolution themselves, the attempts to overthrow monarchy and replace it with democracy, were associated with food: “let them eat cake.” Food reproduces and reinforces ideas of French-ness both as culture and nation: “the cuisine of France ... is greater than the sum of its parts” (2004: 6). The concept of American culture does not begin to The Emergence of National Food Nationalism, Culinary Coherence and the Case of the United States