ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the long 19th century, heritage belonged essentially to the cultural sphere. It was no different for food heritage. Intellectuals, historians and folklorists made large use of it with the aim of “awakening” the national consciousness – as the phrase went. Food nationalism seems to grow stronger as a result of the European Union’s recent difficulties. As an extreme example one could quote the words of UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove who, in late 2017, stigmatized an “unpatriotic attitude towards cheese” in the face of concerns about tariffs on cheese imported to the United Kingdom after Brexit, as if British citizens should consume British cheese and eschew foreign cheese as a matter of patriotism. Witnessing the predominantly geographic sense attach to the notion of origins tends to immobilize knowledge inside artificial boundaries. It would surely be more important to focus on the time dimension, which keeps things alive and on the move.
