The Globalization of Food

摘要

Food, it turns out, is a particularly fruitful topic for exploring the meaning of globalization, not because it leads to any simple explanation but because it exposes the complexities of a process popularly described in simple terms. Deeply embedded in local culture but made portable by technology, food is both necessity and symbol. It is tied to economic developments and ecology, political policy and religion, taste and tradition. And, in the modern era, it has been subject to rapid change. The twenty-one essays in this volume show in multiple ways that globalization is not just recent, that it does not produce only homogenization, and that it is much more than an economic phenomenon. David Inglis and Debra Gimlin begin the volume with a wide-ransine comment on what is now a very extensive literature.