The first reaction that readers used to detecting the argumentative ambition and analytical drive of a book from its title might in this case have is: what an (over)ambitious book! It brings together two of the most paradigmatic and at the same time reified concepts that contemporary social sciences have at their disposal in order to describe the direction and dynamics of the society we live in: globalization and mediatization. While the heyday of the globalization paradigm seems to be over, the conceptual journey of mediatization has only more recently gained some momentum. While the globalization discourse in its origin can primarily be located in the disciplines of political economy and sociology, the latter concept is inspired by debates in the comparatively young field of communication and media studies. What they share is the ambition to provide an encompassing conceptual framework for a “meta-process” that is irrevocably changing the global environment, as well as a powerful synthesis of the various social and existential consequences thereof (Albrow 2004; Krotz 2007). Not surprisingly then, sometimes the two concepts have been argumentatively linked in a powerful manner so as to leave no doubt about a profound ontological shift in a world best understood as a global environment mediated by new technologies of communication (Tomlinson 2008 1999; Castells et al. 2007).
The approach pursued in this book is much more modest. It aims at uncovering the globalization of food and eating cultures by placing the analytic focus on mediatization both as a practice and as a sensitizing concept. We want to show that the disembedding processes associated with globalized eating tend to be mediated by new modes of global communication such as transnationally designed TV cooking shows, glocal advertising, as well as transregional chatting via social media. At the same time, we maintain that these processes of mediatization are not free floating, but linked up with specific modes of everyday knowledge, and thus eventually remediated by societal orders such as regional culture, social habitus, and local milieu (cf. Christensen and Jansson 2015). Perhaps the best way to describe this approach is to say that we treat globalization and mediatization as relational concepts, serving as a constant “analytic other” for each other, thereby curtailing the overgeneralizing ambitions of both concepts. While on the one hand a closer analysis of the complex fabric of mediatization processes should help to add more flesh to the rhetoric of cultural disembedding, the referencing of material and institutional conditions of globalization should in turn help to avoid getting carried away by the celebrated simultaneousness and complexity of cultural experience as allegedly provided by mediatized environments. In other words, we consider this book to be part of a post-paradigmatic understanding of globalization and mediatization alike. In this we share the assessment of James and Steger (2014, 420f.) who argue that the generalizing pretention of all-embracing concepts is increasingly losing its grip on the imagination of academic analysts and lay people alike. There is a need for a new curiosity that again uses concepts as tools in contextual enquiry.
So far, so food. Taking up Savage’s (cf. 2005, 207) notion of “differentiated globalization,” we would argue that food provides a social field par excellence for studying the precise form of global connectivity and its linkage to a complex web of mediatizations. Paraphrasing Oleschuk (2017, 221) on that matter: “Food lends itself well to considerations of the [context driven intersecting of globalization and mediatization] due, on the one hand, to its materiality , and on the other, to its connection to social and cultural representation.” Eating can by all accounts be regarded a rather complex social practice. In its realness, it is a body-related routine of everyday life. In its cultural repertoire, however, it allows for the presence of global mediatized culture. It involves the movement of knowledge, practices, and commodities, implying in turn the capacity to appropriate recipes, the skill for acquiring new cooking techniques, or the consumer power to buy appropriate ingredients. Moreover, there seems to be general agreement now that “foodie culture” is not a preserve of the global elite but that it stretches across a range of social milieus, only the more then to serve as a mediator of horizontal differences in cultural identity and of vertical status-based exclusions (Oleschuk 2017; Paddock 2016; Cappeliez and Johnston 2013).
We believe that this relational and context-sensitive approach to globalization and mediatization through eating cultures can best be pursued in the form of grounded theory and from an interdisciplinary perspective. The book invites specialists from various fields of expertise in sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to explore the mediatization of food and eating cultures in a globalizing world. Their argument is thoroughly based in a collection of case studies from around the world. Their aim is a grounded analysis of how the intersection of globalization and mediatization actually evolves in regionally specific patterns of food culture. To complement their effort, we shall now have a look at some of the underlying conceptual issues in more detail in order to provide some common ground from which to engage with the regional variety of the case studies.
1.1 Globalization Revisited
Food culture, perhaps next to music, is often thought of as exemplifying global flows of commodities and the hybridization cum virtualization of lifestyles in an era of globalization (cf. Srinivas 2003; Viviani 2013). Yet the mere taste for multi-ethnic cuisine would make for a culturally “thin” understanding of globalization processes. In line with other forms of mobilized consumption, it often generates images of a “cut’n mix culture” (Friedman 2002) which tends to overgeneralize abstracting notions of disembedding across time-space. The analysis of globalized food cultures in this book attempts to counter tendencies toward a “disembodied globalism” (James 2005), referring to a discourse on globalization that has actually lost touch to the complex fabric of its material and institutional underbelly. By investigating the situated character of food consumption in a globalizing and mediatized world, this book sets out to deliver a culturally deep understanding of eating cultures in a globalizing world, which counters simplistic accounts about cultural globalization. We attempt to grasp the ubiquitous, globally circulating media coverage of food and eating via reflexive stock taking of what these processes actually imply with regard to regional practices of cooking and eating. We draw attention to the cultural significance of food and eating in people’s everyday lives in general, and investigate the contribution of a mediatized global food culture within the social construction of nation, region, family, home, and belonging in particular.
This places the book somewhere between third and fourth waves of globalization research. Initially following Hay and Marsh (2000) in their periodization of globalization research, one could identify a “first wave” of globalization literature during the 1990s with a strong emphasis on deterritorialization, cultural hybridization, and transcendence of the nation state. The rhetoric of “flows” dominated this first wave, and its protagonists were sure to have found the synthesizing concept for the social sciences in twenty-first-century society (Appadurai 1996; cf. Albrow 2004). A “second wave” of globalization literature, though already present as a sub current also during the first wave, gained momentum around the millennium. It was skeptical about the paradigmatic claims of globalization theory, and the casual empiricism on which these claims largely rested. The ambition of those contributing to the second wave of globalization was not to get rid of the concept altogether, but to demystify claims of an inevitable logic behind globalization, of hypermobility in all spheres of life, and of a deterritorialized society as a result (cf. Scott 1997). While this wave of globalization literature contributed toward a more nuanced understanding of globalization, notably its contradictory consequences and uneven geography, it also threw “int...