Fabricating Authentic National Cuisine Identity and Culinary Practice in Taiwan

In this study, Pierre Bourdieu's field of cultural production and Michel de Certeau's practice of everyday life are applied to incorporate the intersection of macro-historical change and symbolic transformations in the construction of social practices of national cuisines. I argue that the construction of national gastronomic culture should not be separated from the analysis of the following distinctive but linked fields---agriculture, culinary, and tourism in terms of how cultural reproduction takes place, and how they have mutual impacts among/between the fields, by showing that the rupture between the agricultural field and culinary field was historical phenomena under the operation of the imperial power and the global division of labor. On the contrary, tourism contemptuously develops to re-link the historical rupture by means of imposing symbolic value on food production between farms (agricultural field) and kitchen (culinary field), and by empowering the commodification of space and culture. Food is thus, more fiercely than ever, produced with the symbolic value of its associative geographic space, especially in terms of the cultural territory of nation-states.;The relationship between food culture and national identity formation is articulated as an ongoing global practice found in social phenomena as food's capacity to act as a national symbol. The development of a national culinary culture in Taiwan reveals that economic and political interests are intertwined to cook up Taiwanese cuisines for self-representation and other's consumption in local and global markets. Specifically, because it is considered an important project for identity construction, the process of Taiwanese state formation gets deeply involved in the production and reproduction of food's substances and symbolism. Accordingly, this research will not only show how state power is manipulated by different political regimes in Taiwanese history to interfere with food production and consumption for specific political economic interests, but also will emphasize the long-ignored but ineradicable fact that the autonomous agency of Taiwanese actors in relation to culinary practices might implicitly emerge, but most likely appear as a subordinate's concession to the dominant political economic structure.