ABSTRACT
The heritagization of food is based on cultural constructions creating or confirming identity markers. As the topic of heritage is most recently addressed within the wide bibliography of food studies, food history in particular has been analysing how societies and groups historically produced food heritages. This chapter chooses the UNESCO international food labelling as a lens to analyse the limits and the critical points of institutional heritagization. Firstly, this chapter examines the place-based identity paradigms involved in UNESCO institutional procedures and their articulation on different spatial levels, which tend to overlap and intersect each other in complex geographies. Secondly, it analyses the risks and problems of the constant recourse to past and history – related to issues of authenticity, tradition and nostalgia – aimed at legitimizing food heritage and identity claims.
