ABSTRACT
Appadurai (1990) contends that globalization is constructed as much by flows of labour, technology, ideas and media as it is by flows of finance capital and commodities. This is amply evident in relation to food, where globalization has been associated with the disembedding of diets from tradition and local geographies (Pelto and Pelto 1983; Probyn 1998; Dixon 2002). Typically, these processes are said to destroy unique culinary cultures by subsuming local customs and distinctive exchange relations to a process of ‘Coca-colonization’, or the spread of Western consumption practices (Howes 1996). Yet, such accounts tend to imagine a static and one-dimensional set of interactions between globalization and national food systems. Anthropologists, in particular, reveal that local communities are more than capable of customizing commodities in the act of consumption ( James 1996; Howes 1996; Miller 1997). Moreover, it is difficult to generalize on the balance of economic and social benefits and costs from global connectivity in the food system (Alexeyeff 2004). In Cosmologies of Capitalism, Sahlins (1994: 415) refers to the ways in which peoples in the Pacific Islands have incorporated Western goods and persons into their own ceremonial exchanges, social valuables or sacred customs and suggests that ‘the exploitation by the world system may well be an enrichment of the local system’.
