ABSTRACT. Discussions of good taste, that is the cultural dimension of food consumption, are not informed by any geopolitical insight. Is it because the aesthetic form of food, on a haute cuisine plate, has no relationship to capitalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, and the interstate system, unlike say literature or movies or music? Merely posing the question reveals its dubious presumption. At best, soft bits of geopolitical gristle show up as globalization in discussions of taste on the tongue in the last quarter of the 20th century. But culinary globalization and its surrogate soft power were mostly discussed as flows (with some friction)  with little attention to global hierarchies and inequalities. That gap in gastronomy is surprising because we do have a robust literature, in comparable fields of knowledge.  My argument is primarily about what imperialism takes from the rest of the world, especially its direct subordinates, and revivifies globally, from pizza, pasta and salads, to sushi, ramen, kimchi and bibimbap. 

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BIO. Krishnendu Ray is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU and the Director of the Doctoral Program. He was the Chair of the department from 2012-2021. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016) and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012) and Practicing Food Studies (2024). He was a faculty member and the Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America (1996-2005) and the President of The Association for the Study of Food and Society (2014-2018). He was an editor of the Food Studies journal Gastronomica (2021-2024).