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I know I just riffed off a Tyler Cowen post yesterday, but today, he has an interesting post and a paper online arguing that globalization has been good for food culture, not worse. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but in sum his argument is contained in the opening:

have a theory of food. It’s a fairly simple theory, it’s not perfect, and there are some exceptions. But what makes for great food? Three items: You need competition, experimentation, and pride. Competition — if you are in a strange city, or strange country, and you want to know where to eat, go to the cuisine that is represented by the greatest number of restaurants. That is your best guide as to where to eat. You know they are competing against each other, they are drawing upon a common pool of workers, because they hold network for that cuisine, a whole supply network. Experimentation: cooks need new ideas, food should not sit still. And the third element, the most intangible, is this element of pride. So there are some cultures out there in the world, French culture, Chinese culture, Mexican culture. Everyone in this place loves food, loves to talk about food, loves to think about food…. So these are the basic elements. Competition, experimentation, and pride, and if your looking for good food, essentially look for those elements. And as we will see, our globalized world, for the most part, is strengthening, not weakening in these elements — competition, experimentation, and pride.

It’s a terse polemic against Boveism and a useful reminder of what globalization brings food culture, namely the excitement of cultural juxtaposition, comingling and evolution. It’s something I take advantage of nearly daily, having in walking distance of work or home several all-purpose supermarkets (themselves carrying a global span of products); my favorite produce stand, cheese shop and salumeria in the North End; an excellent Asian supermarket in Chinatown; a Latin-American supermarket in Hyde Square; and several Halal markets selling Middle Eastern/North African provisions at Haymarket. This hyper-cosmopolitanism of food is of recent vintage (though it may have forebearers) and owes everything to the processes of globalization.

Still, I’m not convinced by Cowen’s thesis. Something more goes into great food.

For starters, the exceptions to the competition rule may be more common than he grants. Central Square in Cambridge has lots of mediocre Indian restaurants while the one Afghan restaurant in town is excellent. Conversely, small towns and cities often have good ethnic restaurants.

Even granting the larger point, though, what he’s talking about is the culture of restaurants. Conceptually, we might distinguish between conditions which lead to good cuisine being served and refined in restaurants and good cuisine being developed along national and regional lines in the first place. In fact, the great food cultures he mentions - French, Italian, Chinese, Mexican - by and large developed not in a highly globalized world, but in a pre-capitalist and early-capitalist one. Did they develop from competition? Maybe in instances they did, but it would be hard to prove it, and in any case the analysis should look at which culinary developments came from hired cooking artisans (such as pommes souffles) and those owing to the longterm, collective wisdom of the peasantry (cassoulet, for instance). The latter wouldn’t really be developments by competition, at least not in the market economy sense that Cowen is talking about.

What about experimentation and cultural comingling? Yes, I’m glad the Italians adopted tomatoes, Europe potatoes and the Thai chilis from the New World. And few cuisines are imaginable without spices from tropical Asia. But for the most part, great cuisines developed slowly: French food today, even with restaurant staff limited to a 35 hour week, is probably evolving much more quickly than its preindustrial counterpart. Modernity speeds up our expectations of cultural change and creates food fashions, but I don’t see how this leads to a generalized claim that good food “should not sit still.” It crept slowly in Italy and France and Mexico for years and has turned out fine.

But why did they turn out so refined? “Food culture” is not sufficient. Why these countries? Why didn’t Denmark or Ireland or Senegal develop similarly strong pre-industrial food cultures? My own guess is that favorable climate and topographical diversity help immensely. Certain economic structures (an idle aristocracy? guild networks? a large petite bourgeoisie?) may encourage food refinement, but I’m hard-pressed to isolate a hard-fast pattern. Geographic isolation combined, paradoxically, with occasional geographic mobility also is a common factor (see Italy as the center of trade routes, or Mexico’s mestizo heritage), but this may be mercantalist globalism as much as capitalist. And maybe some of it is just luck.

Once we divide between the question of restaurant cuisines and long-standing national/regional cuisines (and Cowen does at one point), we see that different countries have different stakes in the globalization of food. “If you want cutting edge cuisine,” Cowen argues, “a lot of the best places to go are actually in the Anglo-American world.” Sure, but doesn’t “cutting edge” sway the conclusion to begin with? Cosmopolitan food cultures (the Anglophone world or the Netherlands) have much to gain by globalization of food; in fact, it’s the lack of national food pride on part of their middle class that allows cosmopolitanization to spread so eagerly. France on the other hand, and particuarly Italy, are notably non-cosmopolitan. (I’m having a really hard time remembering having seen an ethnic restaurant in Italy.) For them, fast food and American-style processed food does replace quality food, as the petite bourgeoisie operate restaurants of far more refinement than our diners ever possessed and a peasantry still farms with some degree of artisanry.

In fact, for all his fusion instinct, Charlie Trotter still seeks out food raised and produced with a pre-industrial ethic and modeled on the “still-born” cuisines of the Old World. One can have both cosmopolitanism and artisanal production, but one should also understand that for other globalization means in part the death of a well-honed tradition.