ABSTRACT
Although the fascist horrors of World War II discredited theories of racial supremacy, periodic nationalist revivals continued throughout the twentieth century. The unraveling of European colonialism spurred decades of conflictual nation-building in Asia and Africa, followed in the late 1980s by the collapse of Communism and revived ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe. Even in stable democracies of Western Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, nationalist demagogues enflamed popular fears of contamination by new waves of labor migrants. As nations sought to define and control their boundaries in an increasingly complex world, eating provided a situation in which ethnic groups could gain acceptance or suffer exclusion in a particularly visceral fashion.
