Lily Kelting
Against Heritage
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
Curator: Bora Pajo
Against Heritage
Kelting, L. (2026). Against heritage: The reinvention of traditional foods. University of North Carolina Press.
Available here →August 5, 2026
20260805-lily-kelting-against-heritage-the-wide-angle
The wide angle
The rest of this thread
Lily Kelting
Lily Kelting has published about the terroir of trash for Emergence Magazine, sung the praises of the wildly inauthentic Indo-Chinese schezwan sauce for Vittles' Bad Food issue, and fumbled over the untranslatability of the word "yaar" (Off Assignment). She is the author of Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (UNC Press/Sanctum Books 2026), which Dan Hicks called "urgently erudite, political, and beautifully written." She is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University.
Pull this thread
pulls againstpulls alongside
Heritage is a biased story about the past turned into a product, and the local is itself a global idea.
Against RH · Humans are themselves a technology, and that technology is analog, so digital does not reflect what we are. On: Nostalgia is a delusion about a past that never existed
Against BS · African restitution claims began in 1965 and were defeated by European museum directors, so today's debate happened forty years ago. On: Preservation of material fabric is how the past is kept
Against MS · Nostalgia is a category for critical reflection, and Shanghai's regional foodways are an objection to modernity. On: Nostalgia is a delusion about a past that never existed
Against IH · Belzoni's achievements in Egypt have been ignored because he was a foreign circus strongman rather than a scholar. On: Preservation of material fabric is how the past is kept
Alongside CF · Americans today are not more mobile, less religious or more consumerist than their ancestors, and what changed is security. On: Nostalgia is a delusion about a past that never existed
Alongside PB · A statue's value is conferred by the people who interact with it, not by those who paid for it. On: Preservation of material fabric is how the past is kept
Alongside MD · Nostalgia is itself a form of speculative fiction, and that is what links fandom to reactionary politics. On: Nostalgia is a delusion about a past that never existed
Alongside BM · De-extinction is a failure to learn what drove species extinct, and it threatens the wildness it claims to save. On: Preservation of material fabric is how the past is kept
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