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Food retailers, restaurateurs and transnational families rely on continual border-crossings for the global circulation of foodstuffs. Those crossings are highly regulated. Not everything gets in. This paper provides an overview of how food safety is (unevenly) enacted at U.S. ports of entry. Where government regulators and enforcement agents perceive in certain foods danger of adulteration or contamination, importers and producers also experience threat to customary practices of foodmaking, provisioning and commerce. Synecdochic, part-for-whole, reasoning guides food journeys and helps determine the fate of perishable foods as they attempt to cross semi-permeable thresholds that delineate and connect nation-states, and that make possible, even as they also restrict, the flow of international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A powerful cultural concept not easily translated into English, terroir both contains and communicates valuable associations about place. Because terroir is an important way to communicate with US consumers, food producers work to draw upon valuable associations between food products and their particular places of origin. In this paper, I put forward a notion of terroir as a conceptual terrain onwhich artisan food entrepreneurs negotiate with the potentially fraught relationship between the place where their food products originate and the associations that US consumers might have about those particular places. This in-depth case study analysis examines the complete collection of a transnational gourmet food company's commercial Facebook posts (N = 1485) in order to illustrate how a food-producing firm both creates and revises its virtual identity online through strategic attention to terroir. Because few studies have examined the virtual strategies of artisan food producers with regard to the emplacement of terroir, this project undertakes a richly descriptive case study design by focusing on a transnational specialty food firm based in Indonesia. Its analysis suggests that artisan entrepreneurs can strategically rescale terroir in order to create positive (and therefore, valuable) associations in the face of potentially negative ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within contemporary concerns about the overall health of the US food system, the “local” has emerged as a key concept for strengthening sustainability, community, and access to affordable and fresh foods. For Hawai‘i, the local is more than a geographic category; it is also a core identity by which its residents mark their relationship to place. This double use of localism thereby underlines the personal—and political—stakes of “eating local” in an increasingly globalized food system. This introductory essay for a special journal issue on Hawai‘i’s Food Systems offers the island archipelago as a case study for understanding how these systems-in-place interact with, respond to, and reinforce histories of colonialism, migration and settlement, monocropping, and importation. By attending to critical discourses about localism through the geographic and social particularities of Hawai‘i, themes of place are highlighted as a central concern to the field of Food Studies today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I engage the culturally prevalent contemporary discourse in the United States around "good" foods—broadly understood as whole, organic, slow and local—within the broader political economic context of the current economic crisis, specifically as it relates to class. A commonplace in both coverage and public understanding of that crisis is that it has decimated the middle class. Although a number of problematic assumptions inform this commonplace, I contend that the contemporary discourse around "good" foods is a prominent way in which class is rhetorically recreated and reconfigured, specifically to the end of remaking the myth of the middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lackluster economic climate and determined competition from large commercial retailers, farm direct markets continue to increase in number throughout the United States. Although this trend has been widely acknowledged in the literature, there has been little attempt to explain the forces behind it. This study examines the recent flood of popular and alternative media sources that have popularized local and direct food markets. While acknowledging the clear influence of these sources, the article uses both empirical and interdisciplinary qualitative analysis to critically examine tile trend. Building upon Frederick Kirschenmann's discussion of the "conversational marketplace." this study investigates the ways in which consumers engage and reciprocate the dominant narratives of consumer food culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A culinary revolution in America and elsewhere has recently been pinpointed to around 1963. Three important New Zealand cookery books were published that year, and these are investigated to characterize the worldwide shift. Was "grandma's cooking" lost or "gourmet cooking" gained? Seemingly contradictory evaluations might be reconciled in the light of major changes in the food industry. Good domestic cooks embraced successive modes and also resisted them, primarily by continuing to grow and preserve some of their own food, and then by keeping up the cooking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]