Cooking and Nationalism

A friend handed me an academic journal article over the weekend. It was Igor Cusack’s paper ‘African Cuisines: Recipes for Nation Building’.

We had just finished our lunch of kapana and beer and continued our prolonged discussion about the need to codify Namibian food and cooking as we drove home from the Goreangab Dam where we enjoyed the spectacular views with floating rubbish bins, plastic bags and wild geese too afraid to dive beneath the water.

He thought the article might, as a manner of speaking, contain some “food for thought “.

Cusack is interested in how post colonial actors (the state, political elites and others) use cooking and cookery books to create a ‘national culture’, and thereby draw attention to the promotion of some local dishes as ‘national dishes’.

In doing so, food, like the national flag and anthem, become symbols of national identity – i.e. items that demarcate cultural boundaries and distinguish between cultural insiders and outsiders, something useful for building a nation, a ‘prop’ in the process of ‘imagining a nation’.

For Cusack, (African) cuisine is political: “Cuisines, whether national, regional or ‘ethnic’ should not be considered as neutral innocent concoctions. Like most of material culture, they are clearly products of dominant ideologies and related power struggles… African cuisines are nurtured by such ideologies as imperialism, capitalism and nationalism “.

He continues: “Most emerging African national cuisines – and what people actually eat in Africa, not necessarily quite the same – clearly reflect the colonial encounter and the subsequent dependent relationship with the West, as well as indigenous ethnic culinary practices “.

In the developed world – he argues – ” hellip;it is taken for granted that very nation has its own cuisine “. Furthermore, “each nation has its own cuisine, although the globalisation of culinary culture has added complexity to the relationship between food and nation… Thus the roast beef of old England is being replaced by chicken tikka masala “.

Of course, Cusack wrote his article as a student of politics and not as a chef or a cook or nutritional expert. Which is why I suspect he places such strong emphasis on ideologies whilst paying very little attention to local matters such as ecology, climate, migration, trade, technology or terroir in the development of national cuisines, before, during and after colonialism.

I have pondered the notion of a ‘national cuisine’ and ‘national dishes’ before in this column. But Cusack’s article got me thinking once more; and so did the visit to the kapana sellers.

If all the food cultures of the world have one thing in common, it is that they are all a combination of local and international; and this interaction between the local and the international is as old as the human race.

In this sense, the influence of colonialism or globalisation on local food cultures is neither unique nor distinctive to Africa and emphasising it is little more than stating the obvious.

The tomato is not indigenous to Italy and the chilli not to Thailand or India. Yet no one continues to harp on about the colonial influences on Italian or Indian food when reviewing their cooking or cook books.

Please note the influence of colonialism is not unidirectional, as often is assumed.

The influence of the ingredients from the new world on European cooking is but one obvious example.

The assumption that the nations of the developed world have a national cuisine is perhaps at best an over simplification, and at worst, an unsupported demi truth.

I am convinced that the notion of a national cuisine is truly an imaginary construct that makes only sense outside the national entity itself.

Let me explain: If one were to ask 10 French chefs what the French national dish is, I suspect one would get at least 10 different answers. Now, if one were to ask the same question to ten Mexican chefs, they might all say: Coq au vin or pot au feu or something to this effect.

Repeat the exercise with 10 more chefs from a different country and the effect would be repeated.

I do not think the French gives 10 coarse, toasted breadcrumbs about a national dish. Why should we?

When the dominant food trend at the moment is to return to the indigenous, spatially and culturally, why would anyone want to subscribe to the notion of the national?

I suspect that Cusack reads too much into recipes published on official websites and in African cookbooks. Not every project is political, and the post modern notion that ‘everything is political’ I find conceptually confusing.

I think there is a definite need to produce formal records of our culinary identity but this is one likely to be defined by diversity rather than uniformity.

Such a project would target local Namibians, what they eat, how they produce and cook, rather than the international community of cookbook consumers who organise their cookbook collections in a manner that reflect the international system of nation states.

My biggest concern with scholars such as Cusack is that they write from a million miles away about localities that they have neither visited, nor have sufficient and reliable secondary sources of.

He writes a few paragraphs about Namibia and mentions the absence of cookbooks and highlights the influence of German colonial rule on Namibian cuisine.

During our discussions about Namibian food, I realised that a definition of what Namibian food is is of greater concern to visitors than to locals. Visitors demand authenticity and expect a set of cultural artifacts that is distinct and very different from their own.

With the onset of the new notion of eco cultural and particularly food tourism, the visitor does not want to eat what he or she considers European influenced food, they want the real local deal (whatever that may be).

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