Comparison is at the heart of social sciences, and the study of ‘other’ culinary cultures is as old as the study of food practices – as a privileged and enduring object of anthropology. More recently, the cross-national comparison of food habits has received a new impulse from other quarters, as the association of eating habits with public health issues has come under scrutiny. Whereas the former had fostered studies of eating practices and their meaning within an overall social organisation,...