Paper long abstract:

Since 1978, Gilroy, California, has been celebrating its identity as the self-declared "Garlic Capital of the World" with an annual festival. Other towns throughout the United States similarly have festivals commemorating their association with a particular food item grown in or indigenous to the area. As agriculture and production methods shift, however, some of these towns lose their direct connection to the food product, yet the festivals remain, sometimes memorializing an association that is more a part of the localities' past than present.

Examples of annual commemorations of food-place associations throughout the United States range from the Margaretville (NY) Cauliflower Festival to the Kodiak (AK) Crab Festival. Through consideration of Gilroy's successful food festival, the Gilroy Garlic Festival, this paper explores the creation, negotiation, and celebration of a food-themed identity in the service of generating a positive communal identity and promoting tourism. I scrutinize the deliberate signification of garlic, produced in the Gilroy area, as iconic of that locality's communal identity. I am interested in how this relationship is commemorated, and how the chosen food is, as a tourist attraction, iconized and becomes a defining element of the localities' identities.

Rather than focusing on a particular cultural or ethnic group, my research focuses on localities—geographically defined clusters of people—and the way image makers in these places articulate their collective relationships, past, present, and future, through food events. When the association between a place and a food item is abstracted and promoted, and the food becomes emblematic of the place, the communal landscape becomes a foodscape. When a locality stages a festive performance of its food-themed identity, it becomes a festive foodscape. Attention is given to the complimentary notions of useable past and invented traditions, as well as to the consumption of place and the seeming importance of differentiation.

The Gilroy Garlic Festival began as an attempt to draw attention to Gilroy's garlic production. During its 28 years, the Gilroy Garlic Festival has grown from a small, local initiative to a large, internationally recognized food festival. With the Gilroy Garlic Festival, we can explore how place and identity are realized through food association, and how residents and visitors partake in the invention and subsequent consumption of place. Conversely, there are unsuccessful attempts to commemorate a food-place association, one of which I discuss briefly.