Gastroimaginaries: a framework for conceptualizing narratives of food and place in the American South

This article develops the concept of gastroimaginaries - narratives that use food as a rhetorical device to define and encapsulate what are believed to be the essential characteristics of a people, place, and time. The article adapts the concept of social imaginaries - defined by Taylor (2023) as "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others & mldr; " - to underscore the significance of food-related narratives for shaping, reinforcing, and potentially contesting regional identity and place-making projects, and for signaling membership within a particular group or imagined community. I apply the gastroimaginary framework to an analysis of food media representations of the American South, arguing that dominant gastroimaginary frames - which emphasize potent but generally uncritical ideas like hospitality and nostalgia - generally elide the realities of food system labor and environmental and other externalities; alternative or subversive gastroimaginaries, however, can both attend to these past and present realities while imagining more radical futures.