Nostalgia, Prestige, and a Party Every Day

Abstract

“Nostalgia, prestige and a party every day,” examines how food marketers and producers have manipulated cultural associations between food, status, identity and ideas about the past to boost market reach. Processed food alternately imitates and provides a counterpoint to ideas about “traditional” foods. At the same time, many people make efforts to retain habits and knowledge associated with milpa-based cuisine. The chapter acknowledges the inherent destructiveness of nostalgia in the variety that anthropologist Renato Rosaldo called “imperialist nostalgia,” mourning that which one has destroyed, in ways that further displace and destabilize historically dominant ways of preparing food.