Abstract
This introductory article argues for making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world and the importance of inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies scholarship more broadly. Articles in this Special Issue illustrate that foodways of the transhispanic world are heterogeneous and conflicted. Yet, food discourses allow us to study how people think with food, using it to mark identities, to establish power relationships and to dispute them. Articles in this collection demonstrate how transnational forces condition the food cultures and discourses of this context. They also highlight culinary nationalism and the inextricable links communities and nation-states construct and sustain between food and national cuisines from within and outside of nation-states or state-less nations. Both critical frameworks, the transnational—which engages imperial expansion, neocolonialism, globalization and migration—, and the national—in which foodways change in the context of intercultural encounters, are essential to understanding food cultures and their discursive and textual forms in this context.
The nineteenth-century Spanish novelist and feminist Emilia Pardo Bazán identifies the culinary as an important ethnographic document. She claims that what people eat tells more about them than other ‘indagaciones de carácter oficialmente científico’, and that the ‘platos de nuestra cocina nacional’ are as important as ‘una medalla, un arma o un sepulcho’Footnote1 to a nation-building discourse that has the potential to unite Spaniards across regional boundaries and, in theory, across class lines.Footnote2 Her interest in the culinary, and the power she attributes to it in her fiction and in her two cookbooks, is echoed by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. His oft-repeated assertion that ‘Man is what he eats’, captures the idea that food not only sustains life, but also shapes who we are.Footnote3 Developing this notion, the Italian historian Massimo Montanari points out that food and culture rather than being separate or existing in opposition to one another are a single entity: food is culture.Footnote4 The practices of food cultivation, preparation and consumption share an ephemerality that can only be incompletely captured in representations. Yet, food discourses allow us to study how people think with food, using it to mark identities, to establish and/or to dispute power relationships. The study of food is the study of its cultures.
Food Studies is inherently interdisciplinary, with production at one end of the continuum and consumption at the other. It is both an aspect of the everyday, involving human activity across the social spectrum, while being, at the same time, symbolically weighted, metaphorical: it is, in the words of Roland Barthes, a ‘system of communication’.Footnote5 Food Studies, like Cultural Studies, engages the work of sociologists, historians, philosophers and anthropologists to decipher the meanings created by cultural phenomena and cultural texts. In this Special Issue we bring together these two formerly distinct fields to demonstrate the tantalizing insights offered by food cultural studies scholarship on the Spanish-speaking literary, political, social and economic worlds, from the early modern period to the present day. Here, we interrogate food discourses critically in order to outline an emerging field; to insert Hispanist voices into the arena of Food Studies; and to propose that food is central to a praxis of cultural studies within the transhispanic world. Food culture, as this volume shows, can be a potent marker of national identity, and yet the food practices and food discourses under scrutiny here speak not just to a plurality of identities, but also to the way that food, as both material object and discourse, crosses boundaries.
Food Studies scholarship has traditionally focused on locations considered to be gastronomically hegemonic such as France and Italy, with the English-speaking world also receiving a great deal of scholarly attention. More recently, however, North American-based scholarship has shifted to focus more closely on food and migration, and to consider the way that food traverses cultural and national borders.Footnote6 There are also an increasing number of excellent works on the role of food in our understanding of issues surrounding race and ethnicity.Footnote7 One of our objectives is, therefore, to make visible an emerging body of scholarship in transhispanic Food Studies: two of our contributors, María Paz Moreno and H. Rosi Song, have already produced culinary histories of Madrid and Barcelona for the ‘Big City Food Biographies’ series edited by the historian and Food Studies scholar Ken Albala.Footnote8
As the editors of this volume, our own contributions to this subfield date from postgraduate research (Anderson [1999]; Ingram [2009]) that established the relevance of food discourses from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain to research on gender, modernization and nation-building that had, until then, tended to focus on more canonical cultural texts.Footnote9 Food Studies conferences, such as the annual Association for the Study of Food and Society, provided the critical foundation and the interdisciplinary structure that characterize our work, and brought to our attention the lack of scholarship on Spain and the limited attention paid to Latin America and Latinx-focused food cultures in the United States. The peripheral status of the Spanish-speaking world within Food Studies is surprising given the centrality of the Columbian exchange to the evolution of European cuisines,Footnote10 the pivotal role played by renowned Spanish chefs in other European courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the proliferation of national cuisines that speak to nation-building and to the global forces of gastro-tourism and nation branding. We see this issue therefore as a vital contribution, drawing scholarly attention to these otherwise largely ignored foodscapes.
Our second, and arguably more pressing aim, is to bring together innovative scholarship on the food cultures of the Spanish-speaking world as a praxis of ‘cultural studies’ scholarship. First used in Food and Cultural Studies (2004), this title acknowledges the place of food within the theoretical paradigms of cultural studies, from the Structuralist to the Gramscian, as Bob Ashley et al. explore the engagement of cultural studies with ‘the complex relationship between power structures and various types of human agency’.Footnote11 As well as Barthes, mentioned above, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Luce Giard and Sidney Mintz have all declared food—and the sites and bodies engaged in its production, preparation and consumption—to be culturally meaningful.Footnote12 Their work within the scholarly disciplines of linguistics, anthropology and sociology, among others have shaped the field of Cultural Studies and have given scholars the critical vocabulary and frameworks to understand the discourses and visual representations of food that give form and structure/fixity to its ephemerality.
The term ‘food cultural studies’ evolved out of British Cultural Studies, although Iberian and Latin-American articulations of cultural studies do not explicitly exclude food as an object of study. Food, like other cultural texts, involves lived practices that leave their residue on the printed texts. It is performative and it produces artefacts, so it meets the criteria for cultural texts specified by Jo Labanyi and Helen Graham in their Introduction to the now classic Spanish Cultural Studies.Footnote13 Furthermore, food, like other cultural texts mentioned by Abril Trigo, carries a ‘sociohistorical symbolic meaning’ and is ‘intertwined with various discursive formations’.Footnote14 Yet, despite the fact that food practices are far-reaching and touch on issues of race, social economy, class, gender, identity, nation-building and the way that communities come to understand themselves, food as a cultural practice is largely absent from academic inquiries into Cultural Studies from scholars of Iberia and Latin America. As Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado notes in his essay for this issue (‘Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless and the Imagination of “Authentic” Mexican Food’), even ‘foundational texts that engage with the very question of cultural practice, like Néstor García Canclini’s Consumers and Citizens or George Yúdice’s The Expediency of Culture, ignore food culture as a category of meaning.
Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies showcases emerging scholarship on the food cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. It celebrates the arrival of dynamic and important research into the links between food and nation-building, as well as academic inquiry into the impact of globalization and global food trends on the way that different Hispanic countries commodify food culture for the purposes of gastro-tourism. It also celebrates the impact of Food Studies more widely on scholars of the Spanish-speaking world, who have begun to turn their attention to a topic once sidelined within the academy for its association with domesticity, femininity and material culture. Cultural texts, such as cookbooks, menus, food television shows, food film, food guides and visual art depicting food or foodways are are now acknowledged to contribute to broader phenomena such as imperial expansion, nation-building, courtly culture, migration, bellic conflict and authoritarian rule.
Food is our text—in its ephemerality and in the traces it leaves on the printed, visual or cinematic text. The focus of Food Studies scholarship ranges from descriptively effusive glorifications of a particular meal or fruit to analyses of global food supply chains and nutrition science.Footnote15 The work of the authors in this collection interrogates food: it examines food discourses critically, situated within specific social conditions and conditioned by structures of state, community and institutional authority (to paraphrase Bourdieu on the cultural field).Footnote16
These social conditions and these structures of state and institutional authority are also at the foundation of our decision to describe this work as ‘transhispanic’: an alternative to the traditional, and now contested, use of ‘Hispanic’, with its implied ‘Spanish’ hegemony, we prefer this term for its emphasis on the connectedness of the Iberian and Latin-American worlds and their diasporas, although our approach to this notion of ‘connectedness’ in no way seeks to invoke a sense of internal continuity or cultural cohesion, nor to perpetuate the erasure of marginalized and minoritized communities.Footnote17 To study the discourses of ‘transhispanic’ food is to acknowledge the colonial dynamic that forged these connections from histories of violence, genocide and exploitation, at the same time as it established pathways for the movement of cooking processes, food and agricultural technologies, ingredients and tastes.Footnote18 To isolate the Spanish from the Latin-American and US Latinx contexts would make opaque one of the facets that makes food cultural studies so engaging for our field: food processes and ingredients move and shift; they mingle, borrow and steal; and the study of their discourses and representations reveals critical points of contact and difference across the geographies we refer to here as ‘transhispanic’.Footnote19
This Special Issue demonstrates both the conditioning of food cultures and discourses by transnational forces and how culinary nationalism sustains inextricable links between communities and nation-states based on food. These critical frameworks, the transnational—which engages imperial expansion, neocolonialism, globalization and migration—, and the national—in which foodways change in the context of intercultural encounters, are essential to understanding food cultures and their discursive and textual forms in this context. From this transnational framework, we seek to explore the meanings that food and food discourses establish beyond the paradigms of national identity; to draw attention to the link between food identities and the positioning of individuals and communities according to ethnicity, gender, class and age, as well as to the ways these identities negotiate local, regional and global attachments.Footnote20
Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies provides a deeper understanding of culinary nationalism in the transhispanic world not only as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but as a phenomenon that still flourishes in the twenty-first century. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson writes: ‘more than ever food and cuisine are tied to place. The circulation of goods and ideas notwithstanding, more and more countries propose culinary distinction as a marker of identity’.Footnote21 The erasure of the rigid geographical and political boundaries that sustained culinary nationalism has only seen an intensification of the concept of the food nation, even as writing about the Iberian Peninsula, for example, must argue for an understanding of culinary nationalism that allows for ‘unity in diversity’ and does not subsume regional cuisines into the country’s culinary centre.Footnote22 An important aspect, therefore, of any analysis of transnational food culture must take into account culinary nationalism.
The transnational is sometimes considered to be of contemporary scholarly concern, and yet, colonialism and its legacies resurface in different contexts. Rebecca Earle notes elsewhere that ideological assumptions of European superiority extended to attitudes towards foods and bodies, to the fear of the European becoming co-mingled with indigenous foodways, and to beliefs regarding the power the ‘right’ foods bestowed on their consumers.Footnote23 Historians such as Earle and Rachel Laudan identify the Columbian exchange—in particular the raw ingredients and material for processing and trade that the colonization and farming of the Americas brought to Europe—as one of the most remarkable shifts in modern Western history.
The great exception to this is chocolate, its preparation and the material and visual culture of its consumption, as Kate E. Holohan analyses in her contribution to this Special Issue, ‘Una merienda global: The Americas and China at the Early Modern Spanish Table’. Holohan reminds us that food practices leave traces in both visual and written texts. Her study of Pereda’s Still Life with an Ebony Chest, which portrays the making of an extravagant Spanish merienda, traces the global networks represented by the objects in this still life and other genres that depict chocolate services. This material culture and the evolution of social practices around chocolate drinking implicates viewers with the Spanish tables represented in these paintings, providing a visual feast that embodies the ‘interconnectedness of Spain’s global reinos’. Holohan’s analysis of the objects in the paintings and the global trade networks that placed them on these elite Spanish tables draws the attention of contemporary viewers to the foodways and food practices these networks supported. Her study reminds us that these paintings and the objects they represent—objects used by the people who ate from them—have important food culture stories to tell, in this case of the reach of the Spanish empire’s material and visual cultures, and of the lasting impact left on Spain by the incorporation of indigenous American practices surrounding chocolate within the culture and social practices of European daily life.
In ‘De la carta a la papeleta: el “menú del día” entre la dictadura y la democracia en España, 1964–1981’, Eugenia Afinoguénova studies the roots of the Spanish ‘menú del día’ and also emphasizes the role of the transnational in the development of food cultures. Her article explores the links between the development of tourism and the promotion of restaurant-eating as a symbol and symptom of a strong Spanish nation. Originally modelled on the 1960s tourist menus produced by restaurants throughout France and Italy, the Spanish ‘menú turístico’ was a pseudo-national consumer formula with only a superficial relationship to Spanish and/or regional cuisines. Afinoguénova links the creation of the menú to the response of a centralized government bureaucracy to the food and tourist industries. Strict government rules that classified the category and quality of a restaurant meant that actual menús featured international/transnational cooking as much as anything that could be identified as Spanish. By the 1970s, the menú had become the ‘menú del día’. This tourist industry-led formula had found a new public of domestic restaurant-goers, influenced by government propaganda that entreated Spaniards to demonstrate their well-being and politics through their dining choices: a consumer product modelled on a transnational tourist product had become a facet of the Spanish everyday and a form of proxy and practice for Spain’s eventual transition to deomocracy.
Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez’s article, ‘ “Las penas con pan son menos”: Race, Modernity and Wheat in Modern Mexico’, shows how Mexican diets came to adopt white bread and birthday cakes as signs of modernity. Drawing on extensive archival research featuring mid-century texts that inculcate readers with ‘modern’ nutritional theories, and interviews with women from diverse economic and geographic backgrounds, Aguilar-Rodríguez shows how ‘modern’ consumption values reached women of varied background and socio-economic status. These modern ideas featured manufactured and mass-produced foods, white bread and birthday cakes. They also used dubious nutritional arguments for replacing indigenous ingredients (primarily corn) in an attempt to transform indigenous Mexicans into mestizos, and the working class into middle-class citizens. This vision of modern Mexican citizenship involved emulating the white cultures of the United States and Europe. This article shows a top-down transnational vision: modern Mexican citizenship is conditioned by neocolonial values; and diet, race and social hierarchies become co-identified as a part of Mexican modernization.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s contribution to this issue (‘Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless and the Imagination of “Authentic” Mexican Food’), also focusing on Mexico, explores the ‘taken for granted’ category of a national cuisine.Footnote24 This article asks what meanings are created when two Anglo-Americans, Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless, come to be considered authorities on Mexican cuisine and participate in the construction of the national cuisine. How does the category/construct of a ‘national cuisine’ change when it is dissociated from national geography and language and viewed through a transnational lens?Footnote25 To that end, Sánchez Prado broaches the thorny question of authenticity and transnational authority, arguing that Kennedy and Bayless ‘only participate in Mexican culinary nationalism at a distance—informed by it but not committed to projects of state-building or identity development’. The transnational perspective inherent in the projects of these authors allows Sánchez Prado to expose the ‘performances of authenticity’ that structure the way communities legitimize foods, recipes and preparations. The ‘authentic’ Mexican cuisines that Kennedy and Bayless construct succeed in diversifying a largely working-class Mexican cuisine in the United States; they also revalue Mexican foodways within Mexico, Sánchez Prado argues. Even if Kennedy’s ideas of authentic Mexican foods enshrine the authentic as that which resists modernization, while Bayless engages in the neo-liberal practice of translating Mexican foods into an haute cuisine that bestows symbolic capital on upper-middle-class white consumers, their approaches provide a nuanced counter to issues of food-based cultural appropriation. Ultimately, they open the door to a broader consideration of how food involves race, class and gender to create meaning in the Mexican and increasingly Mexican-American social space, exploring the complexities that arise when the construction of a national cuisine depends upon transgressing ideas of national authorities, actors and boundaries.
Focusing on the Peruvian gastronomic boom, Amy Cox Hall, in her article ‘Cooking up Heritage: Culinary Adventures of Peru’s Past’, examines how the chef and food entrepreneur Gastón Acurio creates narratives of cultural/ethnic fusion by connecting eating and heritage to national imaginaries of mestizaje in his popular cooking show. Acurio based his thematic series Aventura Culinaria (2012), on a copy of the 1947 cookbook Cocina y reposteria: viandas tipicamente limeñas y de origen europeo, peruanizadas by ‘la negra Francisca Baylón’. Episodes of his cooking show showcase Peruvian cooking as emblematic of Peru’s cultural mestizaje or mixing, while simultaneously considering Baylón’s recipes as a foundation through which to invent new and more relevant dishes, fusing them with international tastes and spices. Where analysis of the Peruvian foodscape has been primarily celebratory and uncritical, Cox Hall uses Acurio, a self-styled champion of Peru’s indigenous food providers, as a case study, to invite readers to take a more critical stance towards the boom and its national culinary icons. She shows in particular how Acurio’s appropriation of ‘ethnic heritage’ enables him to maintain a strong divide in his television show between white and racialized subjects. In the context of scholarly debates about ‘culinary appropriation’,Footnote26 the power differential between Acurio and his ‘racialized subjects’ renders problematic his appropriation of their culinary heritage. Baylón herself was not the famed African-Peruvian Acurio imagined, but a character invented by an upper-class limeña housewife whose grandparents had emigrated from Italy. Accordingly, her cookery books are themselves a form of culinary cultural appropriation.
In her article, ‘Food Fit for a King: Exploring Royal Recipes in Francisco Martínez Montiño’s 1611 Cookbook’, Carolyn A. Nadeau explores the unprecedented and enduring success of the early modern culinary and cultural icon Francisco Martínez Montiño and his 1611 cookbook, Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería. Looking at questions of culinary authority, Nadeau considers the ‘reading, talking, and thinking about the intellectualized, aestheticized culinary product’ of food as a framework for differentiating between food as material object and food as discourse.Footnote27 She describes how Martínez Montiño’s food text codified a cuisine for the court and aristocracy. The detail in Nadeau’s categorization of recipes helps readers to understand the complexity of this influential cookbook. Her analysis of the recipes, food stuffs and cooking techniques illustrates the way Martínez Montiño constructed a Spanish cuisine that was both dependent on the traditional and the cosmopolitan, and open to culinary difference. With the important caveat that cookery books should not be taken as a faithful depiction of what people ate, her description of recipes and foodstuffs provides a fascinating culinary history of the Hapsburg Court and one of the first written texts of Spanish cuisine.
‘Spanishness’ is also important to the two North American cookbooks under scrutiny in María Paz Moreno’s thought-provoking ‘Discurso ideológico e idea de España en El cocinero español de 1898 y 1938’. This article brings a deep understanding of the cookbook genre to an analysis of two that share the same title, El cocinero español, published in the United States during periods of war. Drawing on the concept of cultural capital and the capacity of food discourse to disrupt or challenge hegemonic structures, Moreno’s exploration of Encarnación Piñedo’s 1898 El cocinero español, the first Hispanic cookbook written in Spanish in the United States, demonstrates that the title in no way reflects its content, most of the recipes being, in fact, Mexican. Piñedo’s authorial persona drew on her Spanish cultural heritage and connections with Europe to dissociate herself from her Mexican ethnicity. As well as inverting the traditional othering of Hispanics in the US, Moreno explores Pinedo’s use of the title The Spanish Cook as a way of showing pro-Spanish sentiment in the context of Spain’s brief war with the United States in 1898 and subsequent loss of empire. Her subsequent analysis of the 1938 cookbook with the same title engages the concept of politicized domesticity and the long tradition of female-authored community cookery books in the United States. The 1938 El cocinero español was produced with a sense of utmost urgency given the devastation of the Spanish Civil War and was intended to provide North American women with a means to help both the Spanish Republicans and the fight against the rise of Fascism in Europe.
Spanish cuisine features more implicitly in Leigh K. Mercer and H. Rosi Song’s article (‘Catalanidad in the Kitchen: Tourism, Gastronomy and Identity in Modern and Contemporary Barcelona’) as the unspoken food nation against which Catalan cuisine must seek to define itself. As Arjun Appadurai explains in relation to Indian cuisine: ‘The idea of an “Indian” cuisine has emerged because of, rather than despite, the increasing articulation of regional and ethnic cuisines’.Footnote28 Ferguson has also written about the importance of regional cuisines to French culinary nationalism, stating that the French regional culinary map reinforced the Third Republic’s ‘zealous’ pursuit of the ‘pedagogy of national distinctiveness through complementary difference’.Footnote29 While many parts of Spain accept that their local culinary traditions are regarded as part of the greater whole that is Spanish cuisine, in other areas, cuisine is a marker of difference from the Spanish State. Nowhere is this more evident than in Catalonia, where cuisine, like language, is often positioned as an important point of difference from Spain, as is illustrated by Carme Ruscalleda’s declaration that cuisine, alongside language and territory, is what makes Catalonia a nation. Mercer and Song’s article also demonstrates the centrality of nationalist food culture to Catalonia’s place as a tourist destination. With reference to a rich array of primary texts, from the nineteenth-century Guía satírica de Barcelona (1854) and Josep Roca i Roca’s Barcelona en la mano (1884) to La cuina del 1714 (2014) and other more recent tourist guides, promotional materials and initiatives, Mercer and Song show how food writers and the Generalitat have promoted Catalan gastronomy both to codify Catalonia’s difference from Spain and to carve a place for Catalonia in the increasingly competitive global culture of food and tourism. A strong work ethic and sobriety are central to the discursive codifications of cuisine and national identity in some of the earlier Catalan tourist discourse, while after the Civil War it became important to highlight proximity to France, seen in guides that are similar in format and content to the well-known Michelin guides. At the end of the Franco dictatorship, revival of Catalan culture relied as much on recuperating cuisine as it did on language, and Mercer and Song describe the work of Catalan’s global chefs who are committed to searching for their gastronomical origins and assuring the value of this heritage in the realm of gastronomic tourism.
Enric Bou’s ‘Food and the Everyday in Spain: Immigration and Culinary Renovation’ also points to the need to see Spanish food culture as a plurality of cuisines rather than a monolithic entity. Here, Bou explores Spain as a site of colonial encounter, in which migration is re-shaping everyday food practices and production, and his analysis of El próximo Oriente (2006) by Fernando Colomo, and La pell de la frontera (2012) by Francesc Serés reveals the ‘feeding occupations’Footnote30 to be sites of complexity, ethical dilemma and anti-assimilation that emerge from attempts at multiculturalism in contemporary Spain.
Conclusion
Sociologist and Food Studies scholar Krishnendu Ray traces the gradual acceptance by philosophers over the past sixty years of the relationship between thinking and the practices of cooking and eating. What we know from thinking is distinct from the knowledges derived from doing.Footnote31 Cooking knowledge is one of those ‘everyday forms of knowing that are not easily amenable to explication’.Footnote32 Food, too, matters, Ray states, as the ‘hinge’ that sustains connections between subjects and objects, ‘another life as the thing that sustains body and mind’.Footnote33 Interestingly, Ray points to a foremother of Hispanic thought, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose comments on cooking uphold the relationship between thinking and food. She writes:
Pues, ¿qué os pudiera contar, Señora, de los secretos naturales que he descubierto estando guisando? Veo que un huevo se une y fríe en la manteca o aceite y, por contrario, se despedaza en el almíbar; ver que para que el azúcar se conserve fluida basta echarle una muy mínima parte de agua en que haya estado membrillo y otra fruta agria; ver que la yema y clara de un mismo huevo son tan contrarias, que en los unos, que sirven para el azúcar, sirve cada una de por sí y juntos no. Por no cansaros con tales frialidades, que sólo refiero por daros entera noticia de mi natural y creo que os causará risa; pero señora, ¿qué podemos saber las mujeres sino filosofías de cocina? Bien dijo Lupercio Leonardo, que bien se puede filosofar y aderezar la cena.Footnote34
September 2019
Notes
1 Emilia Pardo Bazán, La cocina española antigua (Madrid: Biblioteca de la Mujer, 1913), iii.
2 See Lara Anderson, Cooking up the Nation: Spanish Culinary Texts and Culinary Nationalization in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013); and Rebecca Ingram, ‘Popular Tradition and Bourgeois Elegance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s cocina española’, BHS, XCI:3 (2014), 261–74.
3 Massimo Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, and Other Stories about Food and Culture, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia U. P., 2012), 1.
4 Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, trans. Sonnenfeld, 2.
5 Roland Barthes, ‘Toward a Psychosociology of Food Consumption’, in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan & Penny Van Esterik, 3rd ed. (New York/London: Routledge, 2013), 23–30 (p. 25).
6 On food and migration/transnationalism, see projects and seminars at the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto and recent issues of Global Food History.
7 See Psyche Williams-Forson & Rachel Slocum, ‘Race in the Study of Food’, Progress in Human Geography, 35:3 (2010), 303–27; Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York U. P., 2018); Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge U. P., 2012); and Meredith Abarca, Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women (College Station: Texas A&M U. P., 2006).
8 María Paz Moreno, Madrid: A Culinary History (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); H. Rosi Song & Anna Riera, Barcelona: A Culinary and Cultural History of Catalan Cuisine (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
9 See Lara Anderson, ‘Cuisine, Communication, Corpus: Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Naturalist Vision in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain’, MA dissertation (University of Auckland, 1999); Rebecca Ingram, ‘Spain on the Table: Cookbooks, Women, and Modernization, 1905–1933’, Doctoral dissertation (Duke University, North Carolina, 2009). In addition to Lara Anderson’s Cooking up the Nation (see above, note 2), see her ‘Commercial Success or Culinary Legacy: Turn-of-the Century Spanish Culinary Nationalization’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, 34:2 (2010), 341–58. By Rebecca Ingram, see ‘Popular Tradition and Bourgeois Elegance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s cocina española’ (see above, note 2), and ‘Mapping and Mocking: Spanish Cuisine and Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s “El primer mapa gastronómico de España” ’, in Writing about Food: Culinary Literature in the Hispanic World, Cincinnati Romance Review, 33 (2012), 78–97.
10 The Columbian exchange refers to the circulation of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology and ideas between the Americas and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also relates to European colonization and trade following Columbus’ voyage.
11 Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones & Ben Taylor, ‘Food-cultural Studies—Three Paradigms’, in their Food and Cultural Studies (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–25 (p. 1)
12 See Barthes, ‘Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’ and, by the same author, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001 [1st French ed. 1957]); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John & Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Raymond Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 10–24; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed., with an intro., by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) and his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, intro. by Tony Bennett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau & Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2, Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986) and his Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
13 See Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi, ‘Introduction. Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1995), 1–24 (p. 5).
14 Abril Trigo, ‘General Introduction’, in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Riós & Abril Trigo (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2004), 1–14 (pp. 3–4).
15 See Julie Guthman, ‘Field Notes. Food: Provocation’, Member Voices, Fieldsites, 4 August, <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/food-provocation> (accessed 7 October 2019).
16 See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Johnson.
17 Alberto Ribas-Casasayas & Amanda Petersen, ‘Introduction’, in Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Transhispanic Narratives, ed. Alberto Ribas-Casasayas & Amanda Petersen (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2015), 1–12 (p. 10).
18 See Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2013); Earle, The Body of the Conquistador; and Carolyn Nadeau, Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016).
19 On the political and gendered dimensions of the term Latinx, see Salvador Vidal-Ortiz & Juliana Martínez, ‘Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X’, Latino Studies, 16:3 (2018), 384–95.
20 Gwen E. Chapman & Brenda L. Beagan, ‘Food Practices and Transnational Identities’, Food, Culture & Society, 16:3 (2013), 367–86 (p. 368).
21 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ‘Culinary Nationalism’, Gastronomica. The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 10:1 (2010), 102–09 (p. 105).
22 See Eugenia Afinoguénova, ‘ “Unity, Stability, Continuity”: Heritage and the Renovation of Franco’s Dictatorship in Spain, 1957–1969’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16:6 (2010), 420–24; and Lara Anderson, ‘The Unity and Diversity of La olla podrida: An Autochthonous Model of Spanish Culinary Nationalism’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14:4 (2013), 400–14.
23 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 2–3.
24 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2006), 4.
25 Sanjeev Khagram & Peggy Levitt, ‘Constructing Transnational Studies’, in The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, ed. Sanjeev Khagram & Peggy Levitt (London/New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–22 (p. 4).
26 See for example Robby Soave, ‘White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food: It’s Cultural Appropriation: “It’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture” ’, Reason.com, 23 May 2017, n.p.; available at <https://reason.com/2017/05/23/someone-created-a-list-of-ethnic-restaur/> (accessed 4 September 2019).
27 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 21; quoted in Nadeau, ‘Food Fit for a King’, note 5.
28 Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:1 (1988), 3–24 (p. 21).
29 Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 127.
30 Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1.
31 On the meanings derived from practice and cooking, see also Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1990), and Giard, Certeau & Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2, Living and Cooking, trans. Tomasik.
32 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, xix.
33 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, xix.
34 Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, Biblioteca Digital Tamaulipas, 13; available at <http://www.bdigital.unal.edu.co/39758/1/132027.pdf> (accessed 7 October 2019).
35 Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, 13.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.