Greek Food After Mousaka : Cookbooks, "Local" Culture, and the Cretan Diet

In the wake of international publicity about the Cretan/Mediterranean diet, I survey, contextualize, and critique cookbooks about Cretan/Greek food. In order to address such issues as human health, nature/ecology, and "eating local," I examine how cookbooks negotiate regional and national identities in the context of transnational discourses like medical science and ecology. Specifically, I argue that Cretan cookbook authors draw on the Greek nationalist ideologies of folkloric cultural continuity and aestheticism, as well as the discourse of science, in order to negotiate Cretan food in ways that resist modern sensibilities. An examination of their intersections with American cookbooks makes even clearer the contested nature of such discourses, and indicates that a degree of Crete's local agricultural and foodways autonomy might be at stake in these texts.