ABSTRACT
The globalization of culinary cultures reached new levels of interconnection as a result of post–World War II mobility in people, goods, and ideas. The apparent democratization of interest in culinary cultures has not always translated into genuine pluralism, meaning an acceptance of bodily and cultural difference. New media also contributed to the integration of culinary cultures in the postwar world, just as postal services and newspapers, telegraphs, and photography had mediated the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century global eras known, from a European perspective, as the Enlightenment and the Victorian period. In former colonies, as in nineteenth-century Europe, cuisine offered significant contributions to the cultural project of nation building. The gentrification of peasant cuisines and plebeian street foods did little to democratize culinary hierarchies. Political coalitions, such as the international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina, organized protests against international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, which they saw as infringing on the right to food sovereignty.
