Food and Drink Traditions

Everyone eats, yet cultures around the world have developed strikingly different traditions surrounding food and drinks, ranging from customs, concerning the slaughtering of animals to food preparation, snacks, meals, and toasts. Foodways may be localised, but they have also long been globalised, with trading routes transporting both staple and luxury ingredients and produce between far-flung destinations: Bronze Age salt roads, ancient intercontinental spice routes, the Classical Mediterranean's wine and garum trades, and the introduction of New World produce into Old World kitchens all evidence of the historical significance of food and drink for economies and societies.

Eating and drinking customs continue to travel, intermingle, and influence one another to this day through the increased ease with which people and their food and drinks can be transported around the world. At the same time, however, people are embracing elements of their traditional foodways as a means of reinforcing and sustaining cultural identities. In multicultural cities, this is true for both immigrant and native populations. It is thus that, for example, the immigration-driven flourishing of foreign foodways in Copenhagen has occurred alongside revitalised or possibly reinvented traditions of ultra-localism, most notably in the form of the so-called 'New Nordic' cuisine.