I spent a lot of time feeling defensive about working comparatively— at the beginning, especially in grad school, when it was all more half-baked, I got a lot of flak for working in this way. These are fair questions though: Why these three case studies of the U.S., Northern Europe and India? Why compare at all? But the truth is that I started doing fieldwork in the U.S. South as a graduate student, then moved to Germany and could not afford to fly back and forth home on any regular basis. So that ruled out building a career in American Studies. And then I moved to India almost a decade ago. So the contingencies of the academic job market chose these examples for me. I am grateful because I think no one else could ever have done this work—I really needed a lot of time (almost 15 years) and a lot of space living around the world for this book to take form.

What I think looking from this vantage enables is the idea that none of these chefs are exceptional. René Redzepi, for example, was treated basically like a saint by food media until very recently. And when you zoom out to look at the food and food media of the "New Nordic Cuisine", comparing it with the "New" Southern and "New" Indian cuisines, you can see how unspecial he is, how he is participating in the same nostalgic ideas—romanticizing primitiveness and wildness—as many other chefs and writers who have been participating in these cliché tropes for centuries.

Comparing across these case studies, we can see that even "the local" is a very global idea! "Locality" becomes important in direct relation to the globalization of food culture (like the fact that a hip café in Pune is the same as a hip café in Rome is the same as a hip café—you get the idea). And I find chefs and food writers get really obsessed with the "farm" of farm to table as agriculture is changing rapidly as the climate changes. The Anthropocene is a global phenomenon. And so hopefully the global framework of the book makes it possible to use fine dining as a way to think through these intertwined political, ecological, and cultural crises.

Ongoing thread. More from Lily Kelting to follow