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Brewed in 50 countries and consumed in 150, Guinness Stout has become a global commodity. Although associated with Irish pubs and diasporic populations, it has also become popular in former British colonies of Africa and Southeast Asia. This article adopts a mobility studies perspective to show how Guinness built its global appeal, first through trade and settlement in the British empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and subsequently by navigating the upheavals of decolonization and economic integration in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Transfers of brewing technology and marketing techniques were essential for the company’s success in postcolonial markets. In particular, this article shows that metropolitan exporters could work with colonial subjects to subvert imperial policies. Such alliances were not entirely unexpected, for with its headquarters in a former British colony, Guinness was ideally situated to blend the global and the local, just as the company had successfully bridged the bloody divide of Irish independence, remaining as beloved in Belfast, loyalist heartland of Northern Ireland, as in Dublin, capital of the Irish Republic.

The global spread of lager beers such as Heineken, Budweiser, Sapporo and Corona offers a seemingly classic case of cultural imperialism displacing local beverages including Japanese sake, Bolivian chicha, and African sorghum beer. Empire indeed launched beer to global status, beginning with British brewers shipping ale and porter to provision imperial agents around the world, although by the turn of the twentieth century, the crisp, clean taste of German lager had largely displaced heavier British brews from colonial markets. Lager beer also came to be seen as a civilizing taste in comparison with strongly flavored indigenous drinks, attracting many local consumers, despite imperial prohibitions against native consumption of European alcohol. Ultimately, Europe's export brewers lost out to migrant brewers, who transplanted barley and hops, installed refrigerated machinery, and freed settler colonists and Native consumers alike from their reliance on beer from the metropolis, thereby demonstrating the limits of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Editorial Introduction" in the journal Global Food History features a collection of essays that explore diverse culinary texts from around the world over an 800-year span. The essays cover a range of topics, including the erasure of meat from Indian recipe collections, the magical properties of olive oil in the Mediterranean, colonial menus in Italian East Africa, the history of fine dining in the United States, Chinese tofu in Cold War Taiwan, and the reinvention of river snail noodles in China. The essays provide valuable insights into the cultural identities and historical significance of these culinary practices. [Extracted from the article]

Although the origins of the popular candy called fudge have been traced to American industrial processed foods of the 1880s, an early version known as panochita de leche was made in eighteenth-century Mexico using only rustic brown sugar and milk. The authors of this article combined the methodologies of physical chemistry and food history to examine the development of this dish using the science of sugar refining as well as manuscript and published cookbook recipes, memoirs, and travel accounts. Given the lack of Old World confectionery antecedents to the key technique of whisking the cooling sugar to induce crystallization, they attribute panochita to vernacular Mexican traditions of sugar refining and candy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how culinary infrastructure encouraged and impeded immigrant entrepreneurship in provisioning Toronto before Canada adopted an official policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s. Culinary infrastructure refers broadly to facilities and technologies – both physical and knowledge-based – that undergird food systems. The Anglo-dominated infrastructural hub of the St. Lawrence market provided the central food retailing space during the Victorian era, then became a wholesale depot in the first half of the twentieth century, and finally gentrified into a tourist market in the 1970s. Nevertheless, until the belated rise of supermarkets, most residents purchased food from immigrant entrepreneurs, largely pushcart vendors in the nineteenth century, and increasingly small shopkeepers and street markets such as Kensington in the twentieth. This essay concludes that although the allocation and regulation of markets were intended to assimilate immigrant foodways into an idealized Anglo city, newcomers actively shaped Toronto's culinary geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mole, a complex sauce of chiles and spices often served with turkey, has long been considered Mexico's national dish, but as a symbol of culinary nationalism, its meanings have changed significantly over time. This article uses mole to examine elite and popular expressions of culinary nationalism that accompanied the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s. In particular, it considers the shift away from the city of Puebla's singular mole poblano, which was adopted in the 1920s as a symbol of indigenismo, a somewhat misleadingly named program of ethnic assimilation that sought to create a unified, mestizo (mixed-race) nation, and toward the contemporary celebration of multicultural diversity among indigenous cuisines and populations in the state of Oaxaca, which has become known as the "Land of Seven Moles." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]