Inventing Food Traditions

As food activists push Washington, DC, to be a model of local, seasonal, sustainable food production and consumption, it’s worth asking why the nation’s capital has taken so long to establish a distinctive food identity. Indeed it does have great food, but not terroir, a locale-based sense of unique authenticity, which is more a matter of constructed, subjective reputation than quantifiable, objective standards. In this lecture, University of Maryland Professor Emeritus Warren Belasco looks at the historical, political, ideological, and environmental obstacles to the development of a local food identity in Washington, DC.