Heritage is a story we tell ourselves about the past. And even more specifically, it's about how the past becomes a product that can be bought, sold, or traded on in the present. So my book, Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods is about how culinary traditions themselves become commodities, rhetorics, or even trends. The book compares heritage food revivals around the world, the New Southern food movement in the U.S., the New Nordic Cuisine made famous by Noma, and the burgeoning movement to re-popularize traditional foods and ingredients in India.
The book is also fairly polemical. By contrasting "heritage," which is essentially biased, with "history," a fuller narrative about the past, we can see the way that these food revivals serve the cultural and political interests of the present. This is probably clearest in the example of hip "New Southern" food in the U.S. South—the way ingredients and techniques rooted in the history of slavery are talked about (or, more likely, not) versus the way that grandmothers are talking about (constantly and very nostalgically). It's not just about cultural appropriation. I want to take a stance and critique the way the global resurgence of traditional foods is also linked to other regressive ideas about returning to the past politically and culturally. Implicit in or maybe standing behind my argument is an ecological one: this widespread agrarian nostalgia, in which something like a slow-roasted carrot becomes a kind of fetish object, is also linked to the imperilled future of agriculture worldwide as a result of climate catastrophe.
The title of the book's introduction is "It's About Time" because what I am really getting at is the way that the past, present and future are all tied together in this particular culinary moment. "Who controls the past controls the future," as George Orwell wrote. But I am also gesturing toward something less rooted in the linear time of late capitalism. I end one chapter with the Ghanaian image of the Sankofa bird, which reaches back to the past to bring it forward. I am against heritage because I am looking for truer and fuller ways to go back.
Ongoing thread. More from Lily Kelting to follow.
