| Sumario: | In hierarchical societies across diverse cultures and time periods, food producers are often made invisible for the purpose of enhancing the prestige of tastemakers in their respective societies. Engaging Intersectionality theory with the history, anthropology, and archaeology of foodways can elucidate how what we term "prestige-as-erasure" manifests in various social contexts. This paradoxical invisibility arises from food producers' labor underpinning the very foundations of culinary prestige, while that same labor remains devalued within global capitalist and precapitalist systems. Food producers' contributions are intentionally and unintentionally obscured—regardless of distance from origin to consumer—while tastemakers reap disproportionate credit. We engage examples from multiple continents and centuries to demonstrate that Intersectionality theory does not only apply to modern cases of racism and sexism. Instead, we use anthropology's cross-cultural comparative method to examine how food production and consumption can both bolster and challenge social hierarchies based on race, class, gender, ability, and other axes of identity and prestige/oppression. We demonstrate the potential of archaeology's contribution to food studies as well as the promise of intersectional approaches for those reconstructing and analyzing foodways across pertinent disciplines.
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