Food As a Collective Heritage Brand in the Era of Globalization

Abstract: Following debate surrounding nominations of food practices for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s lists of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), 10 years after the entry into force of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, we observe that the ICH lists count a growing number of food-related heritage elements. Yet food, or even gastronomy, as a cultural domain within ICH has yet to be officially recognized. However, given the trade policies arising from the new globalization, which subject peoples and the planet to imported, globalized, and standardized models and which generate an impoverishment of agricultures and food cultures, major geo-economic issues will play out around this recognition. Thus, along with identification labels of quality and origin that protect certain products and know-how from counterfeiting, other forms of protection could be put into place for the benefit of intangible food heritage inscribed on national lists and of the products, goods, services, industries, and cultural spaces in which they are embedded. From the perspective of safeguarding cultural diversity, which any inscription of ICH should lead to, these protections could operate not only through the cultural policies within safeguarding plans but also through the creation of a new binding legal instrument—“the heritage brand”—which could become an important facet of international trade law.