Resumen de A Recipe for Spain: Un país para comérselo's Centralizing Promotion and Othering of Regional Cuisines
The enormously popular Spanish gastrotourism television series Un país para comérselo has been unanimously celebrated by critics and recognized through national awards for its promotion of regional cuisines. In this article, I argue that the programme in fact imagines a unified Spanish taste community, or food culture, in which regional difference is often trivialized or erased. Through a close analysis of the episodes which feature the cuisine of Catalunya and the Basque Country, two of Spain's most problematic sub-nationalisms, this article explores some of the strategies used by the programme to privilege the centre. In the episode on the Basque Country, for instance, my analysis shows how local identities are stereotyped as frozen in time, whilst in the episode set in Catalunya, linguistic and cultural difference is all but obliterated. The attempts in this programme to impose a monolithic view of Spanish cuisine speaks to the potency of centralist nationalism in Spain today.
