New global cuisine: tourism, authenticity and sense of place in postmodern gastronomy

Other authors have gone even further with their criticism. According to Barbara Santich, the co-ordinator of the first Graduate Program in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide in Australia, the buzzword today is globalization, ‘an intermingling of various cuisines and multiple reciprocal influences’ (Santich, 2000). She attacks such culinary hybridizations by noting that ‘when several culinary cultures are put together on the one plate (as, for example, in spaghetti with black bean sauce) the result is “fusion” – or perhaps confusion: in company with others, each culture loses something of itself and its impact is reduced’ (Santich, 2000). Thus, for this author ‘global cuisine might be interpreted as the foods and dishes which can be found anywhere in the world. By extrapolation, it means the same food and dishes throughout the whole world. And this is precisely the reproach, that globalization results in homogenization’ (Santich, 2000).