Thomas Hylland Eriksen in the context of "Cultural pluralism"

A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory, or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity (see ethnic nationalism) while others are bound by political constitutions (see civic nationalism).

A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as "an imagined political community […] imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", while Anthony D. Smith defines nations as cultural-political communities that have become conscious of their autonomy, unity and particular interests. Black's Law Dictionary also defines nation as a community of people inhabiting a defined territory and organized under an independent government. Thus, nation can be synonymous with state or country. Indeed, according to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, what distinguishes nations from other forms of collective identity, like ethnicity, is this very relationship with the state.

Creole cuisine (French: cuisine créole; Portuguese: culinária crioula; Spanish: cocina criolla) is a cuisine style born in colonial times, from the fusion between African, European and pre-Columbian traditions. Creole is a term that refers to those of European origin who were born in the New World and have adapted to it (melting pot). According to Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, "a Creole society (...) is based wholly or partly on the mass displacement of people who were, often involuntarily, uprooted from their original home, shedding the main features of their social and political organisations on the way, brought into sustained contact with people from other linguistic and cultural areas and obliged to develop, in creative and improvisational ways, new social and cultural forms in the new land, drawing simultaneously on traditions from their respective places of origin and on impulses resulting from the encounter."

Creole cuisine is found in different regions of the world that were previously European colonies. Creole food can be found in Louisiana (United States), Cuba, Brazil, Peru, the French Antilles, French Guiana, Réunion (France), Mauritius, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic (Caribbean), Mexico, Annobón (Equatorial Guinea), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cape Verde, and others. In each region, Creole cuisine has adapted to local products (so there is no "single" Creole cuisine); however, they share certain features in common: