The Taste of Home

This chapter invites us to reflect on some of the forms of exclusion and privilege examined in earlier chapters in the more mundane yet increasingly central space of food in constructions of Peruvianness. It discusses how a new, cosmopolitan image of Peruvians that comes out of recent nation-branding projects and culinary representations legitimizes the privileges and high social status middle and upper-class transnational Peruvians seek to maintain abroad. Rather than unite Peruvians across class differences, the gastronomic boom and its manifestations in practice reinforce social hierarchies in which middle and upper-class transnational Peruvians are at the top--therefore also reflecting the sort of exclusionary cosmopolitanism is argued is central to middle and upper-class Peruvian lives.