The association between what we eat and what we are is hardly questionable in the minds of the general public even though theorists on the subject have shown the equation to be extremely complex. Food consumption is no mere case of alimentation but also acts as a differentiating and cohesive element in a particular community, and it may be helful for those with no grounding on food studies to offer a brief overview of the various ways of considering the phenomenon in academic terms. In the field of anthropology at the start of the last century Bronislaw Malinowski was among the first to underscore its pre-eminence in his observation that:

Following this line, the preparation of food, as later understood by Claude Lévi-Strauss, becomes a collective and distinctive feature unique to a nation as cooking ‘is with language a truly universal form of human activity: if there is no society without a language, nor is there any which does not cook in some manner at least some of its food’; and ‘behind the opposition between roasted and boiled, then, we do in fact find (…) the opposition between nature and culture’.

Similarly, more contemporary scholars like Uma Narayan see how food has much to reveal about how we understand our personal and collective identities as the seemingly simple acts of eating are flavoured with complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural meanings. As a consequence, ‘Thinking about food can help reveal the rich and messy textures of our attempts at self-understanding, as well as our interesting and problematic understanding of our relationship to social Others.’