ASmith1946 wrote:

> There are several definitions of cuisine. I like Warren Belasco's best:
>
> "Drawing largely on anthropological sources, I define cuisine as a set of
> socially situated food behaviors with these components: a limited number of
> "edible" foods (selectivity); a preference for particular food (techniques); a
> distinctive set of flavor, textural, and visual characteristics (Aesthetics); a
> set of rules for consuming food (ritual); and an organized system of producing
> and distributing the food (infrastructure). Embedded in these components are a
> set of ideas, images, and values (ideology) that can be "read" just like any
> other cultural "text."
>
> Source: Warren Belasco, "Food and the Countercultu A Story of Bread and
> Politics," in Raymond, Grew, ed., Food in Global History. Boulder, CO: Westview
> Press, 1999. 276.

Very nice. I see some areas for quibbles, but overall, tidy. It avoids
the question of national boundaries rather emphatically. I would
suggest that applying these defining terms forces the understanding of
cuisine as a regional thing with the regions of essentially infinite
variety and overlap - a kind of culinary Venn diagram. If you want to,
it can be offered as tightly as a neighborhood, or a city, or the city
and surrounding agricultural area.

But on these definitions, it virtually can't be extended to an entire
nation except for perhaps island nations like Japan, but even then...
More to the boundaries of cultural groups, rather.

Pastorio