Safeguarding Savoir-Faire

"Based on careful research [...], Herman uses visual and cultural semiotics to unpack how food becomes heritage. A valuable contribution about a central site of food heritage activity!" - Jillian Cavanaugh, Professor, Brooklyn CUNY "Herman takes us on a relentlessly critical journey to conclude that [...] national and local culinary narratives can feed into less innocent practices of exclusion." - Cristina Grasseni, Professor, Leiden University "By unpacking the very idea of a "gastronomic France," this book lets heritage narratives speak for themselves, showing how food becomes a crucial arena where nationalism, belonging, and the tensions of contemporary French society unfold." - Chiara Bortolotto, CNRS Overview This book examines the heritagization of food in France, revealing how these processes reflect broader societal tensions around national identity and social inclusion. Addressing a gap in scholarship on French culinary heritage, it investigates top-down policies and local initiatives that promote 'authenticity'. Combining critical heritage and cultural studies, the book highlights the risks of commodifying culinary traditions while exploring sustainable, hybrid approaches to valuing foodways. It unpacks key concepts like terroir and savoir-faire to illustrate how food contributes to constructing social belonging, and considers the impacts of France's gastronomic UNESCO recognitions, highlighting unintended effects such as cultural essentialization and the freezing of tradition. By analysing terroir-based marketing and the "buy local" movement, this book demonstrates how such initiatives can reinforce exclusionary narratives and geopolitical borders. It calls for inclusive approaches to culinary heritage which recognize the flows and exchanges behind traditions, and will interest scholars and students in food studies, heritage and cultural studies, French studies, comparative literature, socio-cultural anthropology, environmental humanities, and human geography. Jenny L. Herman is a postdoctoral researcher at Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University (EIREST), France, and holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, conducted as an FWO fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium. Herman's research incorporates cultural studies, history, social and literary theory, and policy analysis, with a focus on culinary heritage, political ecology, the construction of identity through foodways at the intersection of cultural and agricultural policies.