Heritage and food history. A critical assessment

The heritagization of food is based on cultural constructions creating or strenghtening several identity markers. As the topic of heritage is one the most recently addressed within the wide bibliography of food studies, in particular food history has been analysing how societies and groups historically produced food heritages. This essay chooses the Unesco international food labelling as a lens to analyze limits and critic points of the institutional heritagizazion. Firstly, the essay will examine the territorial identity paradigms involved in Unesco institutional procedures and their articulation on different spatial levels, which tend to overlap and intersect each other in complex geographies. Secondly, it will analyze risks and problems of the constant recourse to past and history - related to issues of authenticity, tradition, nostalgia - aimed at legitimizing food heritage and identity claims.