Gastronationalism and Its Development

There is no doubt that DeSoucey’s article, “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union” published in 2010, has been seminal. The Social Sciences Citation Index reports that the article has been cited 100 times as of July 2019. Together with Melissa Aronczyk’s national branding, gastronationalism is an innovative intervention to the study of nationalism in the past decade. By proposing and promoting gastronationalism, DeSoucey has arguably legitimized the study of food and nationalism in a broader framework of food and politics.

Surprisingly, though, the concept of gastronationalism as DeSoucey has proposed—with a focus on state actors and international organizations as the promoter and provider of institutionalized protection of food items in reference to international relations—is not systematically pursued. What seems to have happened is an eruption of scholarly interest in food and nationalism in various forms. One of the examples is Milanesio (Reference Milanesio2010), whose article was published in the same year as DeSoucey’s seminal article, and it is highly unlikely Milanesio’s study is inspired by DeSoucey’s work on gastronationalism. However, despite the claim that it is a semiotic study, Milanesio’s turns out to be a fine study of the top-down use of nationalism in food in Peronist Argentina. She describes how beef, in particular, was used by the state as a tool of populist nation-building. The scope of investigation is wide covering governmental policies on food informed by science/medicine as well as the balance of payment and political economy. It offers a very nuanced analysis of an increase in beef consumption: it is a mark of a rise in living standard as well as reinstating the masculinity of Argentinians. The article successfully captures the Peronist government’s paternalistic stance toward the Argentinians: the government is looking after the population by making its policies on food security and nutrition very visible. Milanesio also notes an unintended consequence of changes in governmental policy to promote a more balanced diet away from the beef-centric one. The newly officially sanctioned diet—by both medical professionals and the government—turned out to be highly nutritious contributing to the improvement of the nation’s health. The new diet also entrenched the gendered division of labor in terms of preparing good food. Milanesio (Reference Milanesio2010) analyses a range of questions regarding how the state uses food, a topic which other works in the ensuing years continue to explore.

Another article that deals with food and nationalism without referring to gastronationalism, which is also contemporary to DeSoucey (Reference DeSoucey2010), is Raenton (Reference Raenton2010). As a study of the ways in which Finns have negotiated material and symbolic boundaries represented by food in a new environment, as a new member of the EU, its scope of investigation is similar to DeSoucey’s. The perceived need to renegotiate the boundaries of Finnishness represented by food was felt, according to Raeton, because Finland was trying to establish itself as a respectable member of the EU. It is a study of nationalism in its interaction with other states in the international arena. While the background to the investigation—the relationship between the EU and its member states—is shared, Raeton adopts discourse analysis as a main method of investigation. Consequently, its analysis is focused on newspaper articles rather than the government’s policies. In this regard, Raeton’s analysis moves away from an investigation of top-down nationalism and appears to incorporate the framework of banal nationalism as proposed by Michael Billig (Reference Billig1995) or the everyday nationhood approach proposed by Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008). The concept of banal nationalism draws researchers’ attention to the ubiquitous ways for the state to instill the boundaries of “our country” and the mentality to prioritize them without resorting to the use of violence, and as such it is a another approach to top-down nationalism. The everyday nationhood perspective, on the other hand, shifts the focus of investigation to how ordinary people in their ordinary life make sense of and perform the nation. Fox and Miller-Idriss (Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008) argue in the majority of cases, this is done unreflexively through routinized practices. Both banal nationalism and everyday nationhood approaches emphasize the unremarkable ways in which nationalism works in society. Raeton then proceeds to identify four types of discourse on food and Finnishness: the role of food in the construction of Finnish national interest; concern with food safety linked to the re-appraisal of Finnishness; to lead the EU as well as to fight against evil forces of globalization; and the reproduction of Finland as a superior and safe-guarded place for the nation.

The simultaneous publication of DeSoucey, Milanesio, and Raeton on the theme of food and nationalism regardless of reference to the term, gastronationalism, suggests that by the beginning of the 2010s, the time was ripe for scholars to give serious attention to food in their investigation of nationalism which tends to be conceptualized as something to do with the state.

DeSoucey’s approach is faithfully adopted by Cisela Welz’s (Reference Welz2013) investigation into the difficulties the Cypriot government has faced in securing any official status for halloumi. The article provides a useful summary of the EU’s scheme of geographical indications (GIs) such as protected designation of origin (PDO) and protected geographical indication (PGI), which is the key to an investigation into gastronationalism as a tool the state deploys, and its discussion of the difference between GIs and trademark is particularly helpful for novices in the field. What Welz does better than DeSoucey is to highlight the entanglement of nationalism and the workings of international society, a point which has been emphasized by Ichijo (Reference Ichijo, Skey and Antonsich2017) and by Billig (Reference Billig, Skey and Antonsich2017) in response to the former. Ichijo (Reference Ichijo, Skey and Antonsich2017) argues that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), an international organization which ostensibly works for cosmopolitan ideals of peace through mutual understanding, is in fact reinforcing the nation-state based framework through its work including the intangible cultural heritage list. The gastronomic meals of the French, for instance, is worth protecting because they represent the essence of Frenchness, and this has to be protected by all UNESCO member states precisely because of its Frenchness, it is an indispensable part of our common heritage. Furthermore, the complexity which is brought by globalization in ordinary life is aptly captured by Welz (Reference Welz2013, 41), “The case of a Cypriot cheese re-invented by a German entrepreneur to cater to German residents with a Turkish background is, then, a telling example of how associations with place and culture are employed by the food sector in order to ‘re-enchant’ food products and target specific consumer groups.” Welz’s study shows, as DeSoucey has attempted, that globalization is not a one-dimensional, homogenizing phenomenon but something that entices and entrenches nationalism in our world. Food, because of its materiality and symbolism, can capture this dynamic very effectively.

Somewhat aligning to what Raenton (Reference Raenton2010) did, Wright and Annes (Reference Wright and Annes2013) introduce the perspective of banal nationalism in their investigation into the debate on halal hamburgers in France in 2009–2010. As they focus on discussions conducted in national newspapers, DeSoucey’s emphasis on the role of the state in understanding gastronationalism recedes to the background. Wright and Annes identify, in the debate on halal hamburgers introduced by the fast-food chain Quick, defensive gastronationalism which sees the halal hamburger as a threat to French national identity. Wright and Annes (Reference Wright and Annes2013) argue that newspapers have produced three frames to discuss the halal hamburger: the republican ideal, free market, and cultural diversity frames. Each frame considers the halal hamburger as an issue to do with boundaries of French citizenship. By extending the scope of gastronationalism, nationalism expressed in the realm of food, in the direction of banal nationalism, the article highlights the role of food in the social production of meaning of the nation.

Another recent intervention in this regard is Johnathan Leer’s (Reference Leer2018) investigation into food TV shows. Having defined gastronationalism as proposed by DeSoucey as “a range of material and symbolical practices related to food and products that promote nationalism on the micro and macro-levels of societies (Leer Reference Leer2018, 2),” chooses to link gastronationalism with the banal nationalism perspective and to focus on the role of media in promoting gastronationalism. He then embarks on an analysis of two food TV shows, Le Chef en France (2011–2012) with the leading celebrity chef in France Cyril Lignac and Jamie’s Great Britain (2012) with Jamie Oliver. Leer makes two major points: gastronationalism is being normalized in Europe and that a distinction between monoculturalism and multiculturalism is emerging. While these points are valid (and most likely accurate), the article does not develop the concept of gastronationalism further; rather, the article emphasizes that gastronationalism is yet another subunit of nationalism, and as such it would reflect what is happening at the level of nationalism, thus normalizing the concept in the study of nationalism.

While the term gastronatinonalism has proven to be popular, a review of the field suggests that the concept has not been rigorously and systematically developed in the direction DeSoucey (Reference DeSoucey2010) has indicated as a tool of the state to negotiate its way in a globalizing world. There are no major monographs on gastronationalism or gastrodiplomacy, but there are a number of articles and book chapters that have “gastronationalism” as a keyword. In these works, gastronationalism tends to be understood as nationalism expressed in relation to food. This raises a few questions: What is gastronationalism? What does it bring to the study of nationalism? In order to address these, we need to review developments in scholarship on food and nationalism.

Food and Nationalism

There are a number of publications on food and nationalism or national identity in the form of a case study of a particular country or a food item in the past decade. The majority of these works are by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as those from the perspective of business studies interested in branding or marketing. There are still few contributions from politics and international relations, though there have been some attempts to tackle food and nationalism at the more theoretical level as we shall see.

Among the works by historians, there are Kwang Ok Kim (Reference Kim2010), Taylor Sherman (Reference Sherman2013), Jayanta Senguputa (Reference Senguputa2010), and Rachel Berger (Reference Berger2013). Following the method of social history, Kim (Reference Kim2010) provides a concise postwar history of food in Korea (more precisely, South Korea) capturing how the state’s food policy shifts in response to geopolitics and domestic development. It describes how the government was trying to divert people from rice to a wheat-based diet in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War in response to the geopolitical situation. Further on in the 1980s-1990s, what the government was addressing was no longer raw geopolitics but a competition between global modernity setting a certain type of diet as a norm and nationalism focusing on what was “authentically” and “traditionally” Korean such as dog meat. In the same period, cultural activism to protect and preserve “national foods” under the idea of “sinto buri” (body and earth are one) came to the fore. Kim (Reference Kim2010) shows how cultural nationalism and food science came together to promote “traditional” food/diet and triggered public backlash against the equation of modernity with western ways. The article offers a helpful overview of shifts and changes in major forces that influence the relationship between food and nationalism using South Korea as an example.

The remaining three articles are all focused on India. There could be many reasons for this but the strength of scholarship on the history of India as well as the postcolonial dimension of Indian society appear to loom large among the three articles. Sherman (Reference Sherman2013) provides detailed descriptions of shifts and changes of food-related policies in post-independence India with a wealth of references to primary sources, which helps interested researchers to further pursue any of the themes discussed. Sherman traces the evolution of the relationship between food security and nation-building and highlights the importance of food security in securing independence. Sherman’s investigation focuses on the Indian state.

In contrast, both Senguputa (Reference Senguputa2010) and Berger (Reference Berger2013) take a more holistic approach to the question of food and nationalism in India echoing works such as Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1988) and Partha Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993) which focus on the realm of the “private” in the development of Indian nationalism in general. As a study of colonial society, Senguputa (Reference Senguputa2010) deals with the contrasting use of civilizational distinction by various actors in colonial Bengal in their efforts to define who the Bengalis—and by extension, the Indians—were. More clearly in line with Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993) and also with Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1988), Berger (Reference Berger2013) investigates “the house” as a site of struggle between the Indian middle class and imperialists. While she does not make use of the concept of gastronationalism, the article elucidates how food and related devices were used to forge a nation and provides insightful discussions on the gendering and sexualizing of food consumption. Both highlight the efficacy of focusing on food in investigating nationalism: food is both material and symbolic. As Kim (Reference Kim2010) has touched upon, the modernizing government would focus on the materiality of food in reference to food security, geopolitics, and the nation’s health. However, food is at the same time symbolic which could be used both by the state as DeSoucey (Reference DeSoucey2010) and Milanesio (Reference Milanesio2010) have shown and nonstate actors such as activists, commercial sectors, and housewives as discussed by Kim (Reference Kim2010), Welz (Reference Welz2013), and Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1988). In other words, Senguputa (Reference Senguputa2010) and Berger (Reference Berger2013) have shed more light on a unique quality of food as an object of analysis in the context of discussing modernity because it is simultaneously material and symbolic.

Another group of publications can be very roughly labeled as cultural studies due to their concern with representation and semiotics. These are presented by anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and those in cultural studies. They focus on the representation of obesity and body images in France, England, and Germany (Carof Reference Carof2017), of agriculture in Japan (Greene Reference Greene2018), and milk in Mongolia (Thrift Reference Thrift2014). Simons (Reference Simons2010) investigates the semiotics of the pavlova in New Zealand and Australia and Pascual Soler (Reference Pascual Soler2017) the semiotics of food in a play. Let us review what insights these works bring to the study of food and nationalism in turn.

Solenn Carof’s work on the idea of “national body” is rather tangential on the study of food and nationalism let alone gastronationalism. However, the question of whether there is a “national body” that “would reveal norms, values, and practices specific to a country” (Carof Reference Carof2017, 58) has the potential to touch the core of national identity and nationalism. Carof pursues the question by looking into the ideas of fatness/obesity in France, England, and Germany using both quantitative and qualitative data. In addition to gender, age, socioeconomic background, and immigrant origin, national “philosophy” about obesity shapes public representations of how fatness/obesity are used. While the investigation does not directly address gastronationalism or food and nationalism, it suggests another way in which the nation can be regarded as a moral community in reference to food.

Barbara Greene (Reference Greene2018) argues that the rise of agrarian nationalism in Japan since the beginning of the 21st century reflects the permeation of the government’s concern over food security into popular culture. Here, agrarian nationalism is conceptualized as a belief that domestically produced food is safer and better for older adults in charge of feeding their families. She investigates her thesis using manga, comics, which arguably has helped spread agrarian nationalism from the government to urban, younger generations. Greene’s work sheds light on how a top-down initiative can reach a section of the population which could be difficult for the government to reach by mobilizing popular culture. In other words, Greene’s work shows how the state works on society, a classic theme in the study of nationalism.

Eric Thrift (Reference Thrift2014) provides a very interesting and careful case study of “food and nationalism” in Mongolia. Taking a scandal about the “authenticity” of a national food item, tarag (drinkable yoghurt) as a cue, Thrift carefully disentangles the complex entanglement of industrialization in the form of change in lifestyle with the nomadic past as the golden age, science/medicine (what is nutritious and safe and what is good for the nation’s health), culture (the idea of milk as pure, as white, as maternal), heritage, and hostility to the Chinese. What is interesting in his analysis is that while there is reference to civilization in the discourse of pure milk and despite its focus on “purity,” there is no reference to race. In a similar vein to the three articless on India reviewed above, Thrift’s piece highlights why the food-and-nationalism angle is a useful approach to the study of society; it is where a number of factors that matter to us come together, and as such, an investigation based on the food-and-nationalism approach can yield rich results.

In reference to semiotics, Nieves Pascual Soler (Reference Pascual Soler2017) carries out an orthodox analysis of a play, Tastes Like Cuba by Eduardo Machado. It turns out to be a conscientious examination of a literary text and does not tell much about food and nationalism let alone gastronationalism. On the other hand, Simons (Reference Simons2010) offers insights which are relevant to food and nationalism. In investigating the social construction of the meaning of the pavlova historically, Simons (Reference Simons2010) sheds light on the relationship between femininity and nationality in the midst of industrialization and globalization. He shows that the golden age of cake and biscuit baking in Australia and New Zealand in the first four decades of the 20th century coincided with a low female employment rate in the time of nation-building and that the arrival of labor saving devices such as the mechanical egg beater and the rise of cookbooks added further dimensions to the meaning of the pavlova. As food preparation is predominantly seen as a female activity, Simons (Reference Simons2010) shows that a focus on food and nationalism can shed light on the question of gender in social relationships.

Another group of literature can be labeled as political economy or policy focused. There is a work on the political economy of food and globalization (Duval-Diop Reference Duval-Diop2005) which argues that the nation-state has not been subverted by globalization. Another piece of work is on development and its political ecology (Hausermann Reference Hausermann2018) which has rather tangential relevance to both food-and-nationalism and gastronationalism. Conker (Reference Conker2018) touches on the role of infrastructure in the process of nation-building in his study of water nationalism in Turkey. While it is not very relevant to our current study, that is, gastronationalism or food and nationalism, the article provides a summary of the history of state- and nation-building in Turkey which would be useful for those interested in the case of Turkey. In this regard, Aya Hirata Kimura (Reference Kimura2011) has more direct relevance to gastronationalism and food-and-nationalism. In her investigation into the state and its food policy as an instance of governmentality in Japan, Kimura (Reference Kimura2011) focuses on neoliberalism and what she terms “responsibilization” where the government constructs the food problem as a problem brought about by unaware or irresponsible individuals. She argues that shokuiku (food education), an idea that was introduced in 2002 which later became the government’s policy, was the Japanese government’s response to the crises in the food system including the fast deterioration of domestic agriculture, trade liberalization which led to the further decline in the self-sufficiency rate, and food-related scandals. She further shows that by combining food “reform” policies with top-down cultural nationalism, the government has succeeded in framing a problem for a government as a problem of individual morality, thus embodying neo-liberal governmentality. In reference to our concern with gastronationalism and/or food and nationalism, Kimura’s focus on the development of neoliberal governmentality turns out to be relevant and it has the potential to suggest a new route to develop the concept of gastronationalism further.

Furthermore, Simon Estock (Reference Estock2015) has commented on ethics and food security, which is rather tangential to gastronationalsim or food and nationalism. From a more conceptual angle, Daniele Conversi (Reference Conversi2016) discusses a reconfiguration of the concept of sovereignty in reference to food sovereignty. While not directly relevant to gastronationalism and food-and-nationalism, Conversi (Reference Conversi2016) argues that the concept of food sovereignty has helped recover the basic meaning of sovereignty in the globalizing world by combining cosmopolitan and ethno-cultural orientations and that food sovereignty represents a new form of control of territory. These two articles again show that an investigation into gastronationalism or food and nationalism has a lot of potential because food is normative as well. The normative aspect of food directly links to the role of the state as the protector of its integrity and its capacity to protect and provide for the populace.

In reviewing the development of scholarship in the field of food and nationalism, we cannot overlook two recent monographs: Food, National Identity and Nationalism by Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta (Reference Ichijo and Ranta2016) and Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System by Alex Colás, Jason Edwards, Jane Levi, and Sami Zubaida (Reference Colás, Edwards, Levi and Zubaida2018). The former is a possibly first-ever attempt to systematically engage with food and nationalism as a sub-field of nationalism studies that has been long neglected. By applying the “food-and-nationalism” axis to different levels of politics—from the private to the state and to the international—Ichijo and Ranta (Reference Ichijo and Ranta2016) show the utility of the angle as a method of investigating the world we live in. The volume examines a wide range of issues: from a bottom-up creation of the nation through “performing the nation” in devising recipes for Japanese style pasta sauce and actually cooking and consuming it to reaffirm the boundary of the Japanese nation (Chapter 1); the ways in which the Arab-Palestinians in Israel perform the nation through food (Chapter 2); the ways in which the corporate sector enforces the importance of attaching nationality to food (Chapter 3); an example of Meiji era Japan in imposing a top-down idea of the ideal diet for the nation (Chapter 4); the ways in which the government would project itself to the world through gastrodiplomacy (Chapter 5); how the issue of whaling has been transformed from a question of resource management to the one about norms (“Is it OK to eat whales?”) (Chapter 6); and how UNESCO ostensibly working for cosmopolitan ideals, in fact works to entrench the nation-state system through its intangible cultural heritage list (Chapter 7). As the first attempt to systematically apply the “food-and-nationalism” angle to different levels of politics, the volume still has rough edges, but it has shown why the food-and-nationalism angle is very useful in the investigation into our society and it established food and nationalism as a legitimate subject of investigation in nationalism studies.

Colás et al. (Reference Colás, Edwards, Levi and Zubaida2018) take a broad sociological approach to the politics of food. What is particularly relevant is Chapter 8 “Identity: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Religion.” It places the relationship between food and nationalism broadly within the expansion of modernizing capitalism and globalization:

The chapter presents a clear argument about food as a banal way of achieving national integration overcoming the aristocratic and bourgeois contempt of peasants. It discusses the role of the diaspora community in standardizing “national” food, such as pizza as an Italian food item by Italian-Americans in the United States. The chapter emphasizes the modernity of the “nation” in reference to capitalism and later stages of globalization and argues that society trumps nature in forming national/regional cuisine as seen in the construction of Indian cuisine and the Mediterranean diet:

Neither of these two volumes is on gastronationalism per se, but both represent efforts to develop theoretical and methodological angles to study society in reference to food and nationalism. This represents a tangible development in scholarship on the relationship between food and nationalism.

The latest addition to the field is The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism edited by Atsuko Ichijo, Venetia Johannes, and Ronald Ranta (Reference Ichijo, Johannes and Ranta2019). As a volume that investigates under what circumstances national food emerges or does not emerge drawing from a range of case studies, it is not a systematic theoretical contribution to the field. However, by drawing on examples from Portugal, Mexico, the USA, Bulgaria, Scotland, and Israel, to mention but a few, and by investigating various stages of national food—its birth, emergence and decline—the volume illustrates ways in which various social forces work together to shape social and political realities concerning food.