Food Versus Cuisine

“When a food is elevated to cuisine, it is not about its power to fuel the human body, or even its capacity to bring people together around a table, but its function as a vehicle of value that enables some to profit wildly by it” (Galvez 44).

Starting our reading of Eating NAFTA today, Dr. Alvarez asked us to think about some potential questions the text poses for us to come up with. This excerpt got me thinking a little bit about how to interpret it. Galvez brings up this concept of differentiating food versus cuisine, which is a phenomenon I hadn’t seriously pondered until seeing this quote.

It made me wonder: when and how does a food transition into a cuisine? What does that mean for it? I interpret this as Galvez explaining the occurrence when food becomes perhaps more closely related to foodways. We sometimes identify the entity of food merely as fuel and necessary nutrition. A cuisine, however, has a culture associated with it that also includes the people and the experience. Galvez also looks at the potential business benefits of this as being able to make money by serving these cuisines in a way that satisfies a certain group of people.

Today in class, we thought about ‘junk food’ types of products such as Doritos and Coca-Cola. I’d personally say those are more related to being foods, or drinks, rather than cuisines. Even places like McDonald’s and Chipotle make me think a little bit. They do serve a specific cuisine, but can we say those franchises maybe have their own cuisine separate from the original culture? Does that make it just food, then?

Gálvez, Alyshia. Eating NAFTA (pp. 44-45). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.