Fourteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The representation of French gastronomy in the US has been sustained by a rich battery of popular culture clichés, from Ratatouille’s cheerful credo that “everyone can cook” to Emily’s epiphany when biting into a pain au chocolat in the Netflix show Emily in Paris. As shown also by the standard items featured on the menus of mostly fancy French restaurants, French gastronomy in the US has been marketed as a high-end experience aimed at appealing to US consumers’ fantasies about France and traditional French fine dining rather than at representing the actual diversity of French cuisines in France. My paper focuses on the invention of French food in the US as a myth or socio-cultural ideology. It probes the complex transatlantic dynamics underlying notions of cooking and eating “French” in the US. I show that the idea of French food in the US is, predominantly, the imaginary product of contrasting identity politics that, from both sides of the Atlantic, have shaped French gastronomy as a “gastronationalist” project sustained by the belief in a French culinary exceptionalism and transatlantic fantasies. In contemporary food studies, notions such as “gastronationalism” or “gastrodiplomacy” have been articulated to foreground the transnational politics that have fed the formation and exportation of so-called “national” cuisines in a global context. I also look at how contemporary chefs, including queer chefs and chefs of color, are working to create new cuisines that, in turn, are more inviting, inclusive, and globally sustainable.