3.3 Imagined cuisines

The popularity of pasta and other foreign food items may also be related to the way they mediate between the realms of culinary knowledge, food experience and imagination. In creating a new product, a product manager seeks to achieve a certain coherence between the material product (in terms of taste, texture, etc.) and the anticipations evoked by the product through name, appearance and visual design. Put more simply, there is an expectation among the consumers that the product should be what it claims to be. Such judgments of coherence are based upon knowledge and previous experience on the part of the consumer, and imply a shared cultural repertoire between producer and consumer.

Almost intuitively, Henrik knew that fårikål was not going to work: fårikål is a dish which most Norwegian consumers are accustomed to preparing at home, and for which judgments of coherence are likely to be very precise. Norwegians ‘know’ what fårikål should taste like. Hence, any deviation from the homemade variety (due to requirements of industrial production) is likely to be detected immediately and judged negatively. When it comes to foreign culinary concepts, however, knowledge among consumers is generally far more limited, their expectations are less precise, and they themselves are much less likely to be critical.

Consequently, when creating new products based on foreign culinary concepts such as Chinese chop suey, the producer is, to a far greater extent, free to define the product in a way that suits the specific requirements and conditions of industrial mass production. Food provides a particularly suitable medium for representing ‘the other,’ making ethnic cuisine an excellent paradigm, or metaphor, for ethnicity itself. However, such representations of the other are also locally constructed, as they tend to be influenced not so much by the ‘others’ they claim to represent as by cultural configurations of ‘otherness’ among the consumers they address. This is particularly salient in industrial food manufacturing and marketing. Foreign ethnic cuisines, as they are expressed in modern manufacture, are therefore largely based upon local imagery of the other, and may be conceived as imagined cuisines .

Certain culinary formats such as pasta are particularly suitable for the requirements of low-cost mass production. In addition, a foreign cuisine which few consumers have first-hand knowledge of will easily lend itself to the technical requirements of mass manufacture. The imaginary of foreign cuisines which makes them suitable for industrial production. This applies especially to convenience foods, for which scepticism with regard to product quality is perhaps most enhanced. Appropriation of exotic elements must, however, be balanced with some level of familiarity and of significance. Even though the appropriation of food from, for instance, New Guinea would imply an extreme degree of freedom on the part of the manufacturer to define the cuisine in a suitable – and potentially profitable – manner, this strategy was rarely pursued. The reason for this is a place like New Guinea still fails to constitute the careful balance between foreignness and familiarity that is required for marketing purposes. Most importantly, New Guinea cannot be said to represent a significant ‘other’ for Norwegian consumers, in the way that, for instance, ‘America’ or ‘Italy’ does.

Although all nations are ‘foreign’ in the strict sense of the term, only the latter two nations are familiar enough to be elaborated in the construction of imagined cuisines. The extent to which a manufacturer’s definition of a certain product influences consumers’ concepts of an exotic cuisine depends, however, on whether or not the manufacturer is able to present the product as authentic.

This ability, in turn, depends on the extent to which the product manager succeeds in choosing culinary elements that still retain a promise of something exotic or unique – that is, elements whose meanings are not yet eroded by the mechanisms of routinization.