Tasting the World: Food and Cultural Aspects in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s Around the World of a Novelist

This article analyzes how food functions as a cultural and narrative device in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s Around the World of a Novelist (1924), offering insight into early-20th-century global encounters as mediated through diet and gastronomy. Framed within literary analysis and food studies, the study focuses on Blasco Ibáñez’s representations of food across Japan, China, India, and the Americas, identifying how culinary practices serve to construct cultural otherness, negotiate identity, and reflect broader ideological frameworks. The methodology involves close textual reading combined with interpretive tools from cultural anthropology and nutritional science, especially regarding traditional versus industrial food systems. The analysis finds that Japanese foodways are portrayed as ritualized and harmonious, Chinese cuisine as ingenious yet unsettling, Indian diets as spiritually driven but materially scarce, and American food systems as abundant and industrialized. Across these accounts, food emerges not merely as sustenance but as a marker of civilization, modernity, and cultural difference. The article concludes that Blasco Ibáñez’s narrative captures a transitional moment in global food history, documenting both the persistence of traditional culinary systems and the rise of industrialized, globalized nutrition, thereby positioning gastronomy as a key lens for understanding travel literature and cross-cultural representation.