In Thailand today local cooking-school classes are a popular attraction on many tourist itineraries. Moreover, these experiences almost always prompt rave reviews from international visitors: “It was so much fun!” But why are cooking school classes fun? And what does this pleasure tell us about the cultural logics of authenticity in Thai culinary tourism and, more generally, about the commodification of food and identity in the contemporary global economy? Drawing on ethnographic observation in two of Thailand's primary tourist destinations, Bangkok and Chiang Mai, this article explores how cooking schools' claims to cultural authenticity intertwine with participants' experiences of playful entertainment. The ways in which cooking schools mobilize these dynamics illuminate the complex production and consumption of hierarchies of value within the global experience economy. On the one hand, Thailand's insertion within transnational circuits of touristic mobility and cosmopolitan desire has made the creative strategies of recreational cooking schools possible as well as potentially lucrative. On the other hand, the encounters schools stage between Thai and tourist participants remain framed by appetites for exotic cultural difference that ultimately reflect and reproduce global hierarchies of power and privilege.

By adopting a “weak” version of cultural relativism, we can manage our own ethical discomfort without disrespecting those whose culinary values and practices we do not share. This entails recognizing the contextual and performative aspects of all gastronomic rhetoric, including claims of expertise over questions of culinary authenticity and standards of acceptable behavior during the consumption of food and drink; all such claims, while often couched in the language of moral certainty, are in reality susceptible to contestation. It is thus in the language of right and wrong that those engaged in culinary discussions affirm, negotiate, and modify the prevailing standards of taste and good manners. This becomes especially clear when local people test foreigners' willingness to adapt to local gastronomic practices and styles of consumption, aspects of performance that are often coded in ways that force uninitiated outsiders to fail, perhaps unknowingly, in local eyes.

Sugar beets grown in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota are the most important source of American-made sugar. Contemporary sugar production and consumption provoke some bitter disagreements. Local growing and processing of sugar beets is an essential economic driver in the Red River Valley region, yet these gains would not be possible without massive federal subsidies. Moreover, genetically modified sugar beets are refined into a substance that is directly linked to national epidemics of diabetes and obesity. This article explores lessons the author learned by moonlighting as a truck driver for the sugar beet harvest. Rather than dismiss industrial food as fake on the one hand or “foodie culture” as entitled on the other, the author looks for how the quest for authenticity can transcend this divide. He argues that food work offers ways to see differently the priorities of people invested in both local food and industrial food systems.

Foodways in Singapore embody the anxieties of the island-state—namely heritage, race, identity, and authenticity. Hawking in Singapore was initially seen as a nuisance that had to be tolerated and later regulated by both the colonial administration and newly independent government. The relocation of hawkers to centralized food centers marked the imposition of order and hygiene onto a squalid industry. Street peddlers, once an administrative problem, were refashioned into a potent symbol of Singapore's heritage. Hawker food has also been used as a trope of multiculturalism to unite a racially diverse people. The influx of foreign workers from the mid-1980s presented new tensions that shed light on the cultural power of food to articulate inclusion and exclusion. Markers of authenticity, namely historical traditions and artisanal expertise, map haphazardly onto the realities of actual foodways. Finally, a breed of connoisseurs, who grew up in a cosmopolitan nation-state, was birthed in the 1990s. Embracing the low culture of hawker food, local foodies impute new cultural meanings to hawker food that embody the tension between distinction and democracy.

Alongside the emergence of a new breed of chefs from diverse social and culinary backgrounds in Istanbul during the last two decades, new culinary interpretations and appropriations are appearing with regard to what is signified by authenticity in culinary products and practices. Here localism unfolds as the main trend and theme. This tendency is further strengthened by the formation of a new political economy of taste in Istanbul, which is defined by a double movement. On the one hand, there is a nascent transition in culinary work from craftsmanship to a more specialized professionalism, a process that invokes significant economic and social tensions. On the other, a new eating public is emerging, a more cosmopolitan foodie group, with more ambition, desire, and motivation to try culinary products that are out of the ordinary.

This article examines how Philadelphia’s emergent middle class—young, urbane, educated, and overwhelmingly white—digests the gentrifying multiethnic city. Drawing on Yelp reviews of South Philadelphia’s Mexican restaurants, it deconstructs their conflicting ideas about “authenticity.” Naming the authentic has an important social function for these consumers: by exhibiting their cross-cultural literacy and cosmopolitan tastes, Yelpers signal their belonging to and mastery of the diverse city. By categorizing what is “really Mexican,” this article suggests, they solidify their status as self-styled urban adventurers.

This introduction to a special issue forwards “the reinvention of food” as an analytical framework within which to make sense, together, of current projects valorizing “traditional” methods of food production as well as efforts to reimagine more sustainable or transparent food provisioning schemes.

This article explores the relationship between Soviet and pre-Soviet histories in the reinvention of traditional foods in Latvia, with particular attention to how these products are transformed into new commodity forms. It focuses on regional home-baked breads and local wines produced from grapes grown in western Latvia. Both of these revivals of culinary heritage engage in complex and contradictory processes of “authentification” by taking an historical artifact—such as a recipe, a piece of equipment, or an ancient tale—and consciously crafting the missing pieces around it to produce an authentic food product, one that includes seemingly anachronistic elements of different eras. The result is a material and symbolic bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) that represents both producers’ and consumers’ innovative efforts to preserve or redefine livelihoods in times of change, and to negotiate complicated cultural memories of various pasts. Rather than dismissing seemingly out-of-place elements as “tampering with tradition,” I show how they are the very foundation of authenticity. I argue that the authenticity of homemade foods, like bread, is based on acknowledging the seemingly misplaced Soviet elements of the processes alongside the “ancient” recipes and modern European infrastructure, while in the case of wine we see an effort to forget the Soviet past and leapfrog to a European future. The fate of such claims, however, depends on the social networks through which the products circulate, as informal networks for home-baked breads become professionalized, and entirely new networks of connoisseurs are created who are interested in following the fate of attempts to grow “real” European wines in Latvia.

This paper examines issues surrounding the values of farmers, consumers, chefs, and other food activists who are working to expand the production and consumption of pastured pork in central North Carolina (a region known as the Piedmont). What I try to demonstrate in this paper are the ways that an “ethics of care” (Heath and Meneley 2010) is often articulated in terms of the cultural categories of “connection” and “authenticity.” These consciously expressed categories are shown to undergird a range of commitments, from concerns about animal welfare, to support for “local” economies, to parental care for children. My discussion considers the relationships among the lives of animals and the meat they yield, as well as the craft that brings about that transformation, and shows how the ethical questions embedded in these relationships and processes depend upon a wider set of cultural practices and values that are pressing concerns in our larger economy and society. I further consider how examining everyday understandings of “connection” and “authenticity,” as revealed in ethnographic work with farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, and other food activists in the Piedmont, can highlight certain tensions within this “ethics of care”—such as tensions about food taboos and certification processes—that speak to the politics of food activism in the region and elsewhere.

Analyzing the Israeli-Lebanese hummus wars, this article argues that both the competition to make the largest plate of hummus in the world and the Lebanese effort to trademark the term “hummus” within the European Union are attempts to legalize and concretize the concept of authenticity, which takes on increasing significance under the pressures of globalization and anxiety over homogenization. In addition it argues that “authenticity” is not determined by static tradition or heritage, but rather by practice. Hummus, therefore, is Israeli so long as it is consumed and understood as such by the Israeli population.

“Authenticity” is a term all too often misused and abused in the popular press, and thoroughly distorted and maligned in the academic milieu. This leads to the peculiar situation that one of the most common terms in both gastronomic writing and the popular culinary imagination has been almost completely excised from academic discourse by an overzealous ideology critique. This conceptual blind spot arose because the topic suggests a valorization of origins, hierarchies, and certitudes, all anathema to postmodern critique. I wish to propose a reconsideration of the term that saves its descriptive and theoretical values from both a naive, unreflective, often reactionary popular usage and from a stultifying politically correct automatism on the part of many scholars.

Our study uses the language of food to examine the representation of socioeconomic class identity in contemporary America by comparing the advertising language on expensive bags of potato chips with that on inexpensive chips. We find that the language on expensive chip bags indeed emphasizes factors that are more representative of higher socioeconomic status, such as more complex language and more claims about health. We also find support for Pierre Bourdieu's hypothesis that taste is fundamentally negative: descriptions on expensive chips, unlike on inexpensive chips, are full of comparison (“less fat,” “finest potatoes”) and negation (“not,” “never”'), suggesting a goal of distancing the upper classes from the tastes of lower socioeconomic classes. Finally, our results expand the relationship between authenticity and socioeconomic status. Previous scholars suggest that the desire for authenticity is solely linked with upper-class identity; we find, however, two distinct modes of authenticity. For the upper classes, authentic food is natural: not processed or artificial. For the working class, by contrast, authentic food is traditional: rooted in family recipes and located in the American landscape. Thus, the authentic experience is linguistically relevant for both classes—an example of the rich meanings hidden in the language of food.

This article takes up the question of the vexed class role of the American celebrity chef, beginning with the premise that, in the U.S., the achievement of class status is inimical with physical labor——and that, nevertheless, celebrity chefs have not only achieved elevated class status, but have become creators of class status for those who eat their food, by allowing diners to take in a proxy version of their own status with their pastas and foie gras. Beginning with a brief history of contemporary chefdom, the article explores the synthesis of perceived French class, American bootstrapper working culture and testosterone-laden cowboy allure that has led to the rise of the contemporary image of the American chef. It then explores the ways in which the dirty work, the physical labor of the kitchen and the labor-free, pristine notion of celebrity come together in the body of the chef, creating difficulties for the diner who seeks to take in the chef's celebrity power with his food, but also swallows the chef's labor, thus sliding backwards on the American class scale, reversing the Horatio Alger story, precisely by seeking to move upward. Similarly, the diner who reinforces his sophistication by swallowing what the chef feeds him is also taking in the unknown, the mysterious, the potentially defiling and disgusting. Television chefdom solves this problem, at once making the chef famous, exposing him as ordinary, and putting him in his place through the mechanisms of reality TV and public judgment.