Food, drink and identity
Subtitle: cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages
By: edited by Peter Scholliers
Publisher: Berg
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Oxford ;New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780585436609
Subjects: Habitudes alimentaires; Food habits; Histoire; European National characteristics; History
Description: Food and drink have provided fascinating insights into cultural patterns in consumer societies. There is an intimate relationship between food and identity but processes of identity formation through food are far from clear. This book adds a new perspective to the existing body of scholarship by addressing pivotal questions: is food central or marginal to identity construction? Does food equally matter for all group(ing)s? Why would, in people's experience, food become especially importantat one moment, or, on the contrary, lose its significance? The origin of food habits is also interrogated. Contributors investigate how, when, why and by whom cooking, eating and drinking were used as a means of distinction. Leading historians and sociologists look at concepts of authenticity, adjustment, invention and import, as well as food signs and codes, and why they have been accepted or rejected. They examine a wide range of periods and topics: the elderly, alcohol and identity in Early Modern Europe; food riots and national identity; noble families, eating and drinking in eighteenth-century Spain; consumption and the working class in the nineteenth century; commensality; the meaning of Champagne in Belle-Epoque France; the narrative of food in Norway; wine and bread in French Algeria; food and identity in post-war Germany. This intriguing book brings together new, comparative insights and research that allow a better understanding of processes of integration and segregation, the role of food in the construction of identity, and the relationship between old and new food habits.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index

Meals, food narratives, and sentiments of belonging in past and present /Peter Scholliers --Commensality and social morphology : an essay of typology /Claude Grignon --Upholding status : the diet of a noble family in early nineteenth-century La Mancha /Carmen Sarasu a --Promise of more. The rhetoric of (Food) consumption in a society searching for itself : West Germany in the 1950s /Michael Wildt --Identification process at work : virtues of the Italian working-class diet in the first half of the twentieth century /Paolo Sorcinelli --Bourgeois good? Sugar, norms of consumption and the labouring classes in nineteenth-century France /Martin Bruegel --Old people, alcohol and identity in Europe, 1300-1700 /A. Lynn Martin --National nutrition exhibition : a new nutritional narrative in Norway in the 1930s /Inger Johanne Lyngo --Wine, champagne and the making of French identity in the Belle Epoque /Kolleen M. Guy --Reading food riots : scarcity, abundance and national identity /Amy Bentley --French bread and Algerian wine : conflicting identities in French Algeria /Willy Jansen.