Culinary Complexities in Turkey and Greece: On Food, Nation, and Identity in the Aegean

Abstract: Relations between Greece and Turkey are often imagined in binary terms. A common question typifies such bilateral thinking: Is baklava Greek or Turkish? Popular discussions attaching national labels to select dishes present food as a site for showcasing competitive and stereotypical conceptualizations of identity. In Greece and Turkey, cuisines have been integral elements of nation-building processes that display forms of gastronationalism, which can be traced in debates over the origins of food items that take place in everyday discourse or on international platforms. Challenging such formulations based on "methodological nationalism," which restricts the analysis of cultural processes to those conducted by nation-states, the proposed perspective of "culinary complexities" both underlines the difficulty of containing cultural processes within the confines of nation-states and recognizes recent trends regarding food as a realm in which to express regional identifications that defy and diversify dualities between Turkey and Greece in the shared social ecology of the Aegean.