Search

Copyright of Taiwanese Sociology is the property of Taiwanese Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A lot of books on globalization have been published, but few of them have touched upon the subject of changing dietary cultures in East Asia. The processes of globalization and localization of some particular foods have been studied historically, but few researchers have conducted extensive surveys on the changing culinary preferences of the East Asian people. This paper addresses this issue. It is based on the analysis of data compiled by the AsiaBarometer surveys of 2006 and 2007 : these surveys had contained questions on how different types of foods are favored in 14 countries/regions across East Asia. Data analysis also revealed the fact that D. Held's three perspectives on globalization--the globalist perspective, the traditionalist perspective, and the transformationalist perspective--are all supported by different pieces of empirical evidence, which suggests that the impact of globalization on local dietary cultures has been diverse, and that the nature of such impact depends on the historical development processes in a region or within a culture. Exposure to globalization will in general promote omnivorousness in East Asia, but some countries like South Korea have shown no correlation between their exposure to globalization and their attitude toward foreign foods. It is quite dangerous, therefore, to discuss "globalization of dietary cultures" as a universal phenomenon after only a cursory sampling of the trends prevalent in a few parts of East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]