YOU’RE stuffed. Go on, admit it, you’ve eaten too much. You couldn’t face another morsel, not even an After Eight, not even a tiny wah-fer thin mint, just in case your abdomen explodes. Spontaneous dehiscence – not the best of starts to 2024. A brief fast is in order.

Rather than scoffing, start January by reading a book on scran. One subtitled Around the World In Search Of Food, History And The Meaning of Home. Aye, spend the book tokens on Anya von Bremzen’s globe-trotting quest to find if we are what we eat.

Anya is a Muscovite exiled in Queens, New York City, since the Leonid Brezhnev era.

A food writer for The New Yorker, she knows her onions, her hotdogs, her bagels.

She begins by noting: “With the rise and domination of globalisation, nations and nationalism somehow seem both more obsolete and more vital and relevant than ever.”

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She understands that food, as a national symbol “carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem”. This is true – think haggis and neeps, Arbroath smokies, Stornoway black pudding.

Appropriately, Anya begins her travels in Paris – a city famed for its gastronomy but one with bad memories many will recognise – musty saucisson, crap moussaka on the Left Bank.

She wonders what happened to French cooking, how it tanked after the deft experiments of nouvelle cuisine. Pomposity mutated into the ponderous. Thankfully, there’s been yet another re-re-invention. You can still eat extremely well in Paris. My tip: L’Esquisse in the 18th arrondissement.

Moving on to Naples, Anya asks how the humble pizza achieved relentless global success. Its adaptability is stressed – the link between hardship and hunger in its evolution, and how more than 13 million poor Italians emigrated from 1880-1915 in order to eat.

And now? Pizza has become “a canvas” for ever-specialised treats and add-ons – Alba truffles, handcrafted Campania cheeses. As one local anthropologist says: “The crust is the hardware, the topping is the software.”

Given the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, Anya asks if one way to bring a country together is through its stomach.

Are there lessons here for Scotland? Shouldn’t we brag more about Orkney herring, halibut from the Inner Hebrides, the Oyster Shed on Islay? Why are we selling most of our crab catch from the East Neuk to Spain? We should be eating more of it.

Stephen Lironi’s restaurant in Soho – Maresco – points the way: Scottish seafood cross-pollinated with ideas from the Basque country and Andalusia.

And so on to Seville where Anya tours the tapas bars and feasts on langoustines “the size of a baby’s arm”. Were they landed at Tarbert, Loch Fyne? Harris? She notes Seville boufs of garlic and learns the Arabic origin of the word “albondigas” – al-bunduq, a hazelnut.

She talks too of a culinary self-orientalisation. Reinvention is a recurrent theme in Anya’s book, how self-mythologising feeds cults of the local combined with the international as regards cooking.

In turn we might imagine a foodie Scotland with an ever-mutating “self-Celtification”. Marry this to renewed Europhilic tastes and all allied to our pakora fetish from India, our doner obsession from Turkey, our explorations of Korean and Japanese treats …

There are other trips to Tokyo where we learn consumption of rice is falling and that “umami” means delicious.

Here too there’s ongoing evolutionary twists – ramen began as cheap food for the poor after the Second World War and it’s now hyped by the Michelin crowd.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, Anya discovers the different moles and mezcalerías where spirits are distilled by “fiery feminists”. She finds foodstuffs parallel the political, the claims of the national, the local. One municipal president boasts their grub has “a power to transform our life here”.

Ancestral traditions morph into something rich and strange. “Authenticity” is played with, toyed, chewed.

In Istanbul, Anya sounds a warning. The optimism of Erdogan’s early years has long dissipated. She worries about the effects of his ongoing clampdown. Culinary invention is at risk whenever a multicultural country becomes “an aggressively nationalist state”.

She finishes by studying borsch (pointedly spelt without a “t”) and the competing claims of Ukraine and Russia as to its invention. Anya is left “wary of essentialist gastronationalist claims”.

Her conclusions? Worries about “authenticity” are out to lunch. Rebranding is key. And try not to get indigestion. There’s always the Aludrox.

Happy Hogmanay!