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Although nation building is intricately connected with the construction
of national cuisines, it is not the only factor responsible for the proliferation
of the idea commonplace today that every nation has its own
cuisine and that every cuisine has a ‘nationality’. Culinary globalization
has contributed to grounding this perception. It has become less and less
obvious today for people in many parts of the world to subsist on foods
produced in the immediate vicinity of their residence, as was the case for
most human beings until recently. Instead, professional and home cooks all
over the world rely increasingly on foodstuffs that have been produced
thousands of miles away. Moreover, during the last three decades the diets
of the populations of the First World have been transformed through
the proliferation of hitherto unknown ingredients, flavours and dishes. 15
By the late twentieth century the appreciation of the exotic and culturally
unfamiliar became an equivalent to a claim of social rank and distinction,
and ‘ethnic cuisines’ that derive from outside the European culinary tradition
were turned into hallmarks of global metropolises. 16 At first, the food
was served at cheap eateries run by immigrants and refugees, and routinely
labelled by referring to their homelands. 17 Today, as Sidney Mintz has
cunningly phrased, a national cuisine is on its way to becoming a ‘tourist
artifact’. 18 Driven by commercial interests, restaurant, food and tourist
industries time and again reinvent ‘national cuisines’, largely aided in this
task by the media. Not infrequently, they fabricate historical roots and
concoct myths that make ‘ethnic cuisines’ appear more exotic and timehonoured
than they are.
This is certainly the case with Japanese cuisine. Cooks, publicists
and even scholars inside as well as outside Japan tend to drape Japanese
cuisine in an aura of exoticism, uniqueness and traditionalism. They are
inclined to attribute the consumption practices of the past with the characteristics
of the present. The most persistent tendency seems to be that of
cultivating the myth of Japanese cuisine as a refined, time-honoured philosophy
and practice, and extending the aesthetic qualities of kaiseki into a
kind of eternal attribute of every Japanese meal, regardless of class and
degree of affluence. Such fetishized, sentimental notions of the past do not
merely falsify history but also distort our understanding of the present.
As Susan Terrio observed, ‘claims of cultural authenticity in
advanced capitalism are often linked to an ideal, aestheticized premodern
past as well as the groups, labor forms, and products associated with it’. 19
Perhaps the most obvious motive behind the creation and perpetuation
of such nostalgic interpretations of the past is the fact that their appeal
to the public generates distinction and profit for those involved in these
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