Raúl Matta

Food incursions into global heritage: Peruvian cuisine's slippery road to UNESCO

This article provides critical engagement with cultural heritage-making processes conducted by stakeholders and interest groups within the UNESCOs intangible heritage paradigm. By tracking the road of Perus cuisine to the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (the ICH List) and focusing on the turning points during foods shift from culinary to heritage status, the aim is to shed light on the political and economic forces that shape the meanings of food heritage. This article draws on recent research conducted at the intersection of globalisation with cultural and food politics in Peru. The empirical evidence, collected between 2011 and 2014 from individuals directly implicated in Perus food heritage-making, allows for a discussion of how, despite a discursive emphasis on cultural continuity and intercultural dialogue, food incursions into the UNESCO intangible cultural paradigm operate more as an elite-driven competitive global concept than as a tool for cultural safeguarding and inclusive development. To do so, a description of the backgrounds that led to the rise of food heritage awareness in Peru and an account of the evolution of the candidature of Peruvian cuisine to the UNESCOs ICH List are provided.

Celebrity Chefs and the Limits of Playing Politics from the Kitchen

The expansion of the cultural field of gastronomy has fostered the inclusion of new attitudes and values worthy of exposure and social legitimation which, with the help of the media, prompted chefs’ capacities to strategically cross between cooking, science, health, environment, politics, and entertainment. Drawing on recent literature and empirical data, this chapter engages with a critical approach in order to draw the limits of “playing politics” from the kitchen: it shows the difficulty of transforming celebrity chefs’ discourses and ideas into reality, as the positive notions they convey are mainly grounded in entrepreneurial agendas which could hardly result in real social change.