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Folklore's disciplinary heritage in romantic nationalism and its foundational role in theorizing connections between food traditions and community offer insightful perspectives for exploring food within the framework of nationalism.1 Although excellent and far-reaching scholarship in the field has provided characterizations of the American culinary universe as a mosaic of overlapping regional and ethnic food cultures,2 few folklorists have directly tackled the theoretical complexities of food as a site for creating, performing, celebrating, or challenging a national identity. Noteworthy exceptions are a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, edited by Lucy Long and Bill Ellis (2009) and an edited volume, Politische Mahlzeiten: Political Meals, published by folklorist Regina Bendix and Michaela Fenske (2014). Also, an extensive 2014 food studies encyclopedia entry offered my response as a folklorist to anthropologist Sidney Mintz's claim that there is no American cuisine (2002). Drawing on folklore perspectives, I agreed with Mintz that a lack of cuisine represents a diverse multicultural society, but I also argued that the term cuisine itself is problematic. It implies a unified canon of the "best" practices and dishes selected by an elite group within the nation. Instead, following Yoder's lead, I suggested that our national food culture is best conceptualized as a dynamic, interactive repertoire of foodways traditions of all groups constituting the nation (Long 2014).
Theorizing about food and nation, however, has tended to occur more within other disciplines. Influential food studies scholars from history (Cusack 2000; Gabaccia 1998; Pilcher 1998; Pillsbury 1998), anthropology (Appadurai 1988, Counihan 2002; Mintz 2002; Wilk 2006), geography (Bell and Valentine 1997), American studies (Belasco and Scranton 2002; Wallach 2013), and cultural studies (Ashley, et al. 2004) have addressed the topic, and there has been a noticeable increase in attention in the last decade.3 In 2010, historian Priscilla Ferguson coined the term "culinary nationalism" to refer to pride in the distinctiveness and quality of one's cuisine being transferred to pride in the nation itself (2010). Michaela DeSoucey expanded Ferguson's concept using the term "gastronationalism" to emphasize the role of globalization in the construction of both nation and national cuisines (2010), while political entists the concept of "gastrodiplomacy" to name the crafting of positive images through one's food that would then lead other political players to think favorably...