Typical cuisine is a creation of marketing, says author – 01/08/2024 – Food

After a year marked by controversies surrounding food rankings, such as the case of couscous from São Paulo considered the worst dish in the country, Italian, Japanese and Greek cuisine ended up being listed as the best in the world by the website Taste Atlas (Brazil was ranked in 12th).

Despite the great attention given to these types of lists on the internet, it could be argued that the whole idea of ​​a typical food is a fantasy.

“The more I research the relationship between nations and foods, the more this idea seems artificial,” says Russian-American writer Anya von Bremzen, in an interview with Sheet. Despite what he calls people’s compulsion to link each food to its place, this connection has more to do with myth and marketing than with historical facts, he says.

Author of the book “National Dish” (ed. Penguin Press; 352 pages; 2023), or national dish, she traveled across six countries in search of the stories of their most typical foods.

The work, still without a Portuguese version, points out that the majority of these national dishes are recent and promoted in an attempt to reinforce a national identity. This is the case with pizza in Italy, ramen in Japan and even feijoada in Brazil.

“As a national symbol, food carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem, those invented traditions, crucial to building and sustaining a nation and its historical roots,” he says. However, these dishes are “driven by commercial forces, country branding campaigns and neoliberal ideas.”

The key to the issue, according to Bremzen, comes from the study of the very idea of ​​nation-building and nationalism based on renowned studies by academics such as Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) and Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012).

“People tend to project our modern idea of ​​a nation with borders and states to a time when these did not exist. The reality was very different in countries like Italy and France, even in the 18th and 19th centuries,” he says.

This process accelerated even more at the end of the 1980s, when different countries saw defending their (invented) traditions as a way of gaining economic power through protection mechanisms. “It was about defending cultural assets, their economic value and putting a stamp that says ‘this is ours'”, he says.

In his research, Bremzen went to Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca (in Mexico) and Istanbul, ate local foods, interviewed chefs and academics and delved into a search for the history of recipes.

The book works as an interesting travel diary around dishes such as pizza, ramen, tapa and mezze. Each dish is demystified, pointing out its origin and how it was used in this process of reinforcing national identity.

Furthermore, she also focuses on the importance of the gastronomic symbol in times of conflict. The last chapter of the book addresses the dispute between Russia and Ukraine over the flag of borsch, meat soup and vegetables such as beetroot. Since the beginning of the war, the Kremlin has promoted the idea that the dish has Russian origins, while UNESCO recognizes it as Ukrainian.

Even without including Brazil in her study, Bremzen says that she came to the country several times and ate feijoada for the first time at the Copacabana Palace in the 1980s. For her, the Brazilian national dish is also a construction.

“Feijoada is a really interesting case, promoted in the early 20th century in an attempt to create a symbol of Brazil. It was just a basic bean dish that existed in the popular imagination and, with the help of romantic post-colonial elites, was transformed into a national symbol.”

Although his research deconstructs these symbols, Bremzen says rituals have their value. “Something can be an invented tradition, but take root and become part of the national celebration and part of a kind of ritualistic consumption. It’s a fluid process, of creating identities, brands, cuisines,” she says.

As much as she calls the idea of ​​authenticity in the search for traditional dishes just a marketing tool, she says she believes that it is worth traveling to discover food — but that it is not necessary to cling to the idea of ​​historical and untouchable roots.

“The internet is transforming food into something completely transnational. There is great fluidity. We can eat anything anywhere.”

This fluidity, he explains, is positive and can lead to mixtures between gastronomic cultures that break the rules and lead to the popularity of dishes such as stroganoff in Brazil, ramen in Mexico and other foods that can be criticized as “bastards” of the original dishes.

“Mixing cultures is a natural part of the process. Talking about cultural appropriation when it comes to food is empty. We need to talk about racial and class injustices and power imbalances, but not around a discussion about ‘who stole whose spaghetti'” , it says.