ABSTRACT
The dialectics of globality and locality in food keep generating ever more senses of crisis and loss, which in turn are productive of projects to create feelings of stability, security and sense of place in culinary terms. Newspapers are full of reports of a 'global food crisis', this nomenclature itself capturing the manner in which in the present day it seems to be impossible to talk about food outside the terms set by discourses centred around notions of globalization and globality. The dynamics of food globalization are only intricate and often unpredictable, they also point to - and in fact, create - many of the contradictions of an epoch in human affairs marked by endemic globality. The great nineteenth-century gourmet Brillat-Savarin, quoted above, lived in a period where confident assertions about the cultural ‘purity’ of national cuisines and foodways could be agreed to by all persons of good sense.
