In a contested city where existence, territory, and belonging are permanently in doubt, culinary practice operates as a mechanism for constructing and defending group identity through two linked claims: tradition, an asserted lineage that certifies a practice as authentically descended and thereby underwrites the present, and ownership, a quasi-legal claim to a dish or foodway that establishes one group's right by excluding another's. Because these claims are made at the scale of family, sect, and neighborhood rather than at the scale of the city, cuisine in such a setting resists any grand narrative — near-identical dishes are simultaneously claimed by groups whose official histories deny shared origin — so the analytic unit of culinary anthropology becomes the individual and household story rather than a unified national or civic cuisine. Within the anthropology of food and critical food studies, this positions foodways as a site where memory, migration, gendered transmission, generational hierarchy, nationalism, and the politics of authenticity are enacted, and it treats the researcher's own idiosyncratic, memory-based selection as a methodological position rather than a defect.
In a contested city where existence, territory, and belonging are permanently in doubt, culinary practice operates as a mechanism for constructing and defending group identity through two linked clai…