The World On a Plate

This article uses claims about the local globalization of culinary culture to stage an argument about the character of material cultural geographies and their spaces of identity practice. It approaches these geographies in two ways. First, it views foods not only as placed cultural artefacts, but also as dis-placed materials and practices, inhabiting many times and spaces which, far from being neatly bounded, bleed into and mutually constitute each other. Second, it considers the geographical knowledges, or understandings, of foods' geo graphies, mobilized within circuits of culinary culture, outlining their pro duction through processes of commodity fetishism, and arguing for forms of critical intervention that work with the fetish rather than attempt to reach behind it.