Geo-Food and Normative Identities. Power and Privilege Across Competing Traditions

The essay is aimed to interlock respectively the acknowledgment of a proper food symbolism, the rhetorical use of geo-cultural tropes, the purposeful construction of normative narratives and the ideological projection of legal stereotypes. In this perspective, the main theories developed in the research field of studies known as “the anthropology of food” become a hermeneutic device useful to appraise, specify and articulate, in its multifarious components, the cultural dimension usually evoked by comparatist legal scholars when they talk about legal traditions. A specific attention is given to the use of dietary arguments for implanting the fierce competition between continental and English models both at a legal and at a political level