Mahimahi Musubi: Cosmopolitanizing Strategies in Hawaiian Regional Cuisine

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Paper Session: Global Communication and Social Change Interactive Paper Session

Abstract

Hawaiian Regional Cuisine (HRC) is an haute cuisine that uses high quality Island-grown foods in combination with local ethnic flavors and global techniques to form what we term an “engineered cosmopolitan cuisine”. This intentionally developed regional cuisine is analyzed through the work of three chefs who are noted practitioners of HRC. Linking the backgrounds of these chefs with their recipes examines the impact of global cultural flows on the production of cosmopolitan cuisine. A number of “cosmopolitanizing strategies” are interrogated that position HRC concurrently within multiple registers: global, regional and local. Examples of these crosscutting strategies include disruption, performance, and hybridization. The hybridity present in HRC, as a central cosmopolitanizing strategy, both incorporates but also reaches beyond the local. HRC is discussed as a contact zone where waves of commodity, culture, and tradition collide to form an engineered regional cuisine to wash up along global shores.

Author

• Benjamin Burroughs, University of Nevada, Las Vegas