INTRODUCTION: FOOD AND IDENTITY IN CATALONIA

On the evening of Tuesday, 9 January 2018, the chef Ada Parellada held an event at her Semproniana restaurant in Barcelona. It was a special charity supper, open to the general public, called the El Sopar Groc (the Yellow Supper), where all the food would be yellow. The event was held several months after the constitutional crisis that had rocked Spain in the autumn of 2017, when pro-independence protests in the Catalan Autonomous Community (CAC) lead to civil unrest, arrest of public figures, and a long-awaited explosion of tensions between the Catalan regional and Spanish central government. The supper, themed on the colour yellow that had become a symbol of the recent protests, gathered funds for the legal case for a number of the recently imprisoned politicians and public figures, and raised awareness of their plight.

This instance of the use of food in support of Catalan independence is one of many that I saw during my research into the relationship between Catalan national identity and food culture. However, this relationship goes much further than independence politics. In this chapter, I consider whether Catalans express their national identity through food and, if so, what are the ways in which they do so. I begin with an overview of the academic literature that inspired my research, with a particular focus on defining the terms in use in this chapter. I follow this with another literature review, this time of Catalan cookbooks, which provides a short history of Catalan cuisine and demonstrates the importance of these texts to the simultaneous development of Catalan cuisine and national identity. This goes into some of the basic practical elements of Catalan cuisine, and how they relate to other elements of Catalan identity, such as seny. The next section deals with the gastronomic calendar and the importance of travel and national identity performance. Finally, I conclude by considering the complex relationship between food and contemporary independence politics.

INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN FOOD, NATIONALISM, AND IDENTITY

My research responds to the late anthropologist Josep Llobera's call for a better understanding of nationalisms through the anthropological study of their ‘subjective feelings or sentiments’ (Llobera 2004, 188).