Maintaining National Identities: Cuisine, Immigrant Exclusion, and Nationalism

Abstract

National identities are the sum of many different social characteristics. Nationalism collects many different traits to draw a boundary between members of the national community and outsiders or foreigners. Is traditional cuisine one of these boundary-marking distinctions? Cuisine is often used as shorthand for cultural identification with one's own group as well as identification other groups. Logistic regression analyses reject the idea that traditional foodways are a meaningful way nationalists assert their identity. Nationalism is much more grounded in exclusion of immigrants from participation in the national community than in solidarity through shared cuisine.