f Culinary Connections and Colonial Memories in France and Algeria

Late nineteenth-century globalization of the food industry gave formal and informal empire more significance than ever before. This article argues that the French response to this vast colonial marketplace was to embrace the local or terroir, the connection with place and history, as an antidote. Notions of terroir complicated the story of colonial culinary competition and dependence – in the period of empire and the post-colonial period – raising questions of identity, belonging, and the legacy of empire. The consequence was the creation of a sense of a gastronomic “us” and “them” between France and the colonies with implications that continue to play out in contemporary French politics.