Pages: 28

This study situates food heritage within broader processes of generalized heritagization in contemporary societies, understood as the expansion of heritage categories and practices across an increasing range of social domains. It clarifies heritage as a socially constructed value attributed to objects, practices, and traditions and traces how this category has been extended and institutionalized, notably through UNESCO's instruments and the rise of intangible cultural heritage. Thinking about the heritagization of foodways is presented as a way of grasping a specifically modern relationship to food, in which certain everyday foods and eating practices are reframed as identity-bearing and in need of safeguarding. In this context, two regimes of food-heritage making are distinguished. First, a food-related object, whether material or immaterial, counts as heritage when a community names, perceives, and mobilizes it as such, without requiring any precise definition of what this object should be. Second, food is treated as heritage through codification, when practices are framed as heritage insofar as they conform to constitutive rules defining how they should be prepared, performed, and transmitted.

Pages: 77

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 17

In Seridó, food has been a heritage object since 2010, when the Feast of Sant’Ana was listed as Brazilian cultural heritage; actions were planned with a view to safeguarding traditional eating practices, such as the know-how of the mestras de chouriço. At the same time, the growth of tourism, the gastronomisation of regional food, and the promotion of “rustic culture” brands by political agents triggered a heritagisation movement independently of state agencies. Although food is at the heart of the matter, the actions undertaken by institutions have been either non-existent or else ineffective and not known to representatives of culinary traditions. Far from being a vector for the recognition, economic development, or emancipation of knowledge-bearing populations, the official heritagisation initiatives have, in the case studied, produced the opposite effect, reinforcing social and racial barriers. This finding is the starting point for exploring clashes over food heritage in a society struggling with social and political tensions, focussed on the colonial past and re-configuring its identity through eating.

Pages: 14

This chapter examines how French gastronomy, though celebrated since the 19th century through figures like Brillat-Savarin and La Reynière, only truly became a marker of national identity in the 20th century. Local tourism initiatives and provincial restaurants played a decisive role in promoting regional specialties, which soon appeared in tourism brochures as symbols of territorial identity. By the 1920s and 1930s, these specialties were inventoried and adapted to contemporary tastes, forming an informal heritage that tourism actors helped to codify through local guides. The 1937 Paris International Exhibition marked a turning point, presenting cuisine as a national emblem and highlighting the structure of the French meal as a key cultural practice. In the post-war years, gastronomy-based festivals and travel circuits consolidated this link between food, place, and identity, giving rise to gastronomic tourism. The chapter argues that local actors, often with modest means, successfully transformed gastronomy into a key resource for both tourism promotion and cultural recognition. By redefining regional identities and nurturing collective imagination, gastronomy emerged as a central element of France's intangible cultural heritage, well before the official recognition of the “gastronomic meal of the French” by UNESCO in 2010.

Pages: 12

This chapter analyses food heritage as a resource for museum partnerships with tourism and food-sector entrepreneurs. Adopting a constructivist approach, it investigates how food heritage is defined, mobilised, and instrumentalised by different actors, rather than positing a fixed definition. Drawing on the authors’ experience and ethnographic materials from a 2017 to 2019 research and development project at the Estonian National Museum (ENM), it examines cooperation with business partners and their heterogeneous interpretations of food heritage. In the context of democratised heritage policies, three case studies highlight the museum's opportunities and constraints in engaging with new forms of collaboration. The partnership with Mooska Farm led to the co-creation of a film by an entrepreneur and a visual anthropologist, generating a visual representation of a traditional food product that articulates both community expertise and visual ethnography. A food souvenir competition at the ENM exposed divergent understandings of “traditional” foods and prompted reflection on edible souvenirs, but proved ill-suited to long-term cooperation or equitable partnerships. Finally, the project “Flavours of Livonia—A Culinary Route in Estonia and Latvia” revealed the marginalisation of museum researchers and the instrumental (mis)use of regional food heritage, while nonetheless enhancing the museum's critical awareness of its role in shaping heritage interpretations in the business sector.

Pages: 12

Originating in small exhibits of brand memorabilia, China's food museums have grown in scale and ambition to become important tourism destinations, and a keystone in the country's overall heritage promotion strategy. Embraced by a variety of public and private stakeholders, the museums defy easy characterization as cultural or commercial, culinary or brand-driven. Expansive resources combined with competition for ticket sales have led individual museums to consistently upgrade their visitor experience in ways that push the limitations of the museumization of cuisine.

Pages: 18

This chapter examines the recent revaluation of traditional Polish food in Poland. Products and dishes are rediscovered, reinterpreted, and embraced as relevant elements of private and public practices. Ideas, values, and attitudes about heritage and cultural pride affect everyday food-related practices to generate forms of “banal” nationalism and attitudes toward heritage. This process is happening as tensions grow between cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies that define the conditions of experience for upwardly mobile educated middle classes in the country. With few exceptions the food professionals and gastronomy tastemakers involved tend not to frame these phenomena in terms of heritage, a concept that apparently is not yet particularly relevant in the Polish gastronomy. At the same time, it has emerged in initiatives spearheaded by the government and its institutions. This chapter explores the reasons for this difference in interest about formal initiatives about food heritage, precisely when heritage-making dynamics are emerging in media conversations and civil society debates around Polishness, locality at various scales, and tradition. These dynamics will be examined within the specific social and political context of Poland, while assessing its entanglements with the global circulation of objects, people, images, and values—including the inclusion of food into heritage-worth aspects of culture—that is shaping the contemporary foodie scene.

Pages: 90

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this chapter analyses the heritagization of Belgian beer culture, inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016. It investigates the impact of this recognition within an ongoing heritage-making process and examines how food heritage operates as an identity marker, an economic resource, and a political instrument. On the basis of documentation from international exhibitions, archival records, press material, and literary sources, the chapter identifies four main phases in the construction of Belgian beer as heritage. International exhibitions before the Second World War constitute a first phase, followed by a second phase from the late 1950s to the 1986 ‘Year of Beer’, when the ‘Belgian’ dimension of beer is less prominent. A third phase, from 1986 onwards, increasingly frames beer as the core of a rich culture, while a fourth phase begins with preparations for European labels and the UNESCO nomination. By historicizing and deconstructing these developments, the chapter argues that heritagization is a continuous negotiation rather than a recent, linear process and that Belgian beer culture simultaneously serves cultural, political, and economic purposes.

Pages: 12

Focussing on the UNESCO inscription of the traditional Japanese gastronomic meal washoku in 2013, this chapter interrogates the construction of a seemingly timeless national food tradition. It analyses how the nomination file defines washoku through seasonal ingredients, specific techniques, aesthetic presentation, and refined umami flavours, while presenting it as the “traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese”. In contrast, the chapter demonstrates that both the term washoku and the meal format it designates are relatively recent, emerging in the late 19th century and becoming widespread only after the Second World War, whereas earlier everyday diets were more modest and regionally diverse. Drawing on historical and sociological scholarship, it argues that the UNESCO inscription contributes to the invention of a long-standing culinary tradition and to the shaping of a shared national identity through food. The chapter also traces the plurality of actors involved, from state institutions to chefs initially concerned about the disappearance of so-called traditional cuisine. It shows that contemporary Japanese cuisine, as framed in the UNESCO dossier, is grounded both in local dietary practices and in imported elements that have been reinterpreted and integrated into the Japanese culinary system.

Pages: 13

Focusing on the contemporary and global circulation of kimchi, this chapter analyses how a once domestic, seasonal preparation has become both a trendy food and a recognised element of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage. It recalls that kimchi's current visibility in restaurants and popular culture coexists with the centuries-old practice of Kimjang, the collective, annual preparation of large quantities of kimchi, inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 for its social and ritual dimensions. Drawing on historical records and contemporary materials, the chapter highlights Korea's capacity to adapt kimchi and Kimjang (the annual preparation of kimchi) to major political and economic turning points in history, notably the post-1953 orientation towards a Western-style economy and the international exposure provided by the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, which intersected with global healthy-eating trends. It then examines the challenges posed by globalisation, including competition, imitation, standardisation, and the organisation of modern supply chains, and discusses the strategic responses developed in Korea. Finally, the chapter shows how the values attached to Kimjang have been mobilised entrepreneurially, as tools for education, cultural diplomacy, and shared experiences across diverse communities, arguing that kimchi continues to reaffirm Korean identity while embracing modernity.

Pages: 16

Serbian Slava, the celebration of the family Saint Patron's Day, represents a unique religious practice in the Christian world, inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. Closely related to food ritual preparation and consumption, Slava proves to be an ideal case study for researching the unique semiotic translation regarding the symbolism of food on its table, both in the village and the city, during two centuries (1830–2025). Drawing on historical, ethnological, anthropological, and other available sources, this chapter offers the first comparative analysis that follows an essential Serbian tradition from a food and culinary perspective. The turbulent character of this period—marked by large migrations from the countryside to the city, wars, industrialization, female emancipation, political and social changes, as well as Europeanization and globalization—was most directly reflected in the choice of food, its preparation, presentation, and the understanding of its symbolism within the feast, which is an integral part of Slava. Alongside the comparative analysis, this research reassesses the potential risks of heritagization and gastronationalism of Slava food. It also critically examines which traditional foods from the Slava table contain characteristics that position them as gastronomic heritage.

Pages: 16

In the eyes of the world, the baguette has become one of the most recognisable symbols of France, yet this association is both relatively recent and conceptually fragile. This chapter traces the historical emergence of the baguette as a specific bread form and analyses how it gradually came to function as “baguette-as-France” through visual, literary, advertising, and cinematic representations. Drawing on debates about heritage-making and the 2022 UNESCO inscription of “Artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread”, it examines how a banal everyday food turns into a cliché, an emblem, and eventually a heritage object. Mobilising the distinction between two regimes of heritage-making—an identity-based regime and a codification-based regime—the chapter uses the baguette as a privileged case to question the relevance and limits of the category of “food heritage” for accounting for the status conferred by a community, in that case a national one, on a particular food.

Pages: 16

This chapter explores the role of the Italian daily press, particularly Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, in constructing the Mediterranean way of eating as cultural heritage. The analysis reveals diverse voices and interests involved, including academics, producers, ministries, and associations. The press has contributed to repositioning the Mediterranean diet as cultural heritage, with evolving definitions and narratives emphasizing both medical and cultural aspects. The Italian daily press has fostered a sense of identity and belonging among its readers by investing the Mediterranean diet with significance. Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica have played a vital role in building awareness and promoting the preservation of the Mediterranean diet as a shared cultural heritage. They have portrayed it as a national heritage and later as a regional and local heritage, highlighting its connection to specific places.

Pages: 75

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 14

The heritagization of food is a phenomenon that has been on the rise worldwide in recent decades. This chapter contributes to this debate by highlighting some of the complexities that these processes can entail, through the Brazilian case. Focusing on the period from the early 2000s to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, it explores how evolving public policies and shifting political priorities have affected the safeguarding of food-related practices. When it comes to food heritage, protection can be more difficult than registration, as it involves a wide range of factors such as land distribution, agricultural policies and funds, seed protection, traditional peoples’ rights, food security and sovereignty, GMOs, biodiversity, culture, identity, and memory. Thus, it is often not enough to recognize a food or know-how as heritage. This chapter analyzes Brazilian public policies on the registration of food heritage and other policies which, even if they do not explicitly mention heritage, are fundamental to guaranteeing the continuity of different cultures. It shows that land distribution, the rights of traditional populations, and public health policies can sometimes contradict heritage registration. These tensions reflect power struggles between groups within the country. The discussion is intended to inform public policy and broader debates on heritagization processes in different contexts.

Pages: 16

The Amazon, spread across nine countries, is renowned for its natural heritage and biodiversity but far less for the complexity of its native agricultural systems and cuisines. This chapter draws on long-term research among different Amerindian groups in French Guiana (Wayana) and Brazil (Mebêngôkre-Kayapó, as well as Baniwa, Tukano and related ethnic groups). The research was based on participant observation and interviews on agriculture, gathering, hunting, fishing, and cooking, as well as on the analysis of Amerindians’ position in national societies. In both Brazil and French Guiana, ingredients domesticated by native Amazonians, together with their preparations and culinary techniques, have been widely adopted into regional and national cuisines, yet their Indigenous origins and food systems remain largely unrecognized. Native Amazonian cuisines thus constitute an invisible heritage. The chapter examines how these cuisines fit into definitions of heritage, in close connection with the status and social recognition of Amerindian populations, and discusses the tools used to counter invisibility through heritagization. It then presents several institutional and non-institutional cases from the two countries and develops a comparative reflection with other Latin American contexts, highlighting the tensions and challenges involved in making Indigenous food heritage visible.

Pages: 17

Catalan cuisine's bid for inscription on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in the 2010s offers a privileged vantage point from which to analyse heritage-making processes and the tensions raised by recognising food as cultural heritage, especially when campaigns fail to meet their goals. This chapter situates the campaign within a broader context in which cuisine is already mobilised as heritage in the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeast Spain and reviews key debates on heritage and national identity relevant to the Catalan case. It then examines the initiative led by several Catalan institutions to secure UNESCO recognition for Catalan cuisine, before analysing reactions to the campaign within Catalonia. The chapter draws on a wider research project on how Catalans use food to express national identity against a backdrop of growing support for political independence from Spain. Ethnographic interviews, participant observation, group interviews, photo elicitation, and the study of books and print media were conducted over 15 months of fieldwork (2012–2013) and subsequent visits up to 2018. Adopting UNESCO's definition of intangible cultural heritage, with its emphasis on continuity with the past, the chapter also discusses how ‘nation’ is understood in Catalonia as a community grounded in shared culture, territory, history, and mutual recognition.

Pages: 12

Taking the enlisting of the Mediterranean Diet as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO (2010, 2013), this chapter seeks to reflect on the artificiality of heritage processes from a particular ethnographic context – Chefchaouen, in Morocco – and to contribute critically to the debate on the invention or creation of heritage. Focussing on food practices, the text discusses how local populations appropriated an unfamiliar idea of heritage – the Mediterranean Diet – and transformed it, giving it other readings, meanings, and values, while operating on their own terminology, which they adapted to the local and national lexicon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork research carried out in Chefchaouen in 2017 and 2018, the text emphases on the concept of beldi and its recomposition and appropriations at the local scale, identifying it as a tool of agency of the populations in relation to their own food practices and consumptions that are limited and dependent on the circuits of production and sale at the scale of the territory. The text thus seeks to illustrate the various ways in which the idea of heritage can be appropriated and subverted, especially in the path that leads to its transformation into a product and commodity for tourist consumption, from a concrete place – Chefchaouen, in the Moroccan Riff.

Pages: 14

Food and culinary traditions are a crucial element of national and regional heritage. Gustatory practices and behaviors are closely tied to agricultural, hunting and gathering, religious, and social practices and form an important core of collective memory and belonging. Culinary heritage and food heritagization processes have been a focus of research in many parts of the world, particularly in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Lacking from the discourse on heritage cuisines and culinary practices is coverage from sub-Saharan Africa, in particular from the perspective of the role of tourism in the food heritagization process. Conceptually, this chapter examines tourism as a force for the heritagization of food and culinary traditions in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights three cases—Ethiopian and Eritrean injera, West African jollof rice, and Maasai drink traditions in Tanzania and Kenya. In these cases, the food itself is an important element of ethnic and regional heritage, but tourism is key in heritagizing the food-making process, the socialization of eating, and the tools and accoutrements associated with the regions’ culinary traditions.

Pages: 6

The food heritage landscape seems to expand in both variety and complexity around the world. However, heritage finds itself contending with other schemes that operate outside the category of heritage and its characteristics and are not perceived or framed as such, although they are meant to ensure protection and visibility for various aspects of culinary cultures and traditions. Against a background marked by globalization and intense mediatization, this conclusion examines how the relationship between heritage and heritage processes with other forms of safeguard, support, and promotion – both public and private – of products, recipes, and practices is increasingly intricate.