"Time and Microbes, Tides and Bodies"

In 2018 Artsy declared fermentation “the art world’s strangest new trend.” Why fermentation and art? And why fermentation as art? A trend, by definition, is temporal, prone to disappear as quickly as it appears. Fermentation, in contrast, is about endurance. It is about extending time, about stretching it to last longer, and about making foods—and the worlds that they support—survive.

I’m proud to have contributed my first article to the journal Food, Culture & Society. And I’m prouder still of the two collaborative projects that it documents and the brilliant creatives I had the good fortune of cooking them up with.

The first 50 online copies are free to download, so read more here about time and microbes, tides and bodies, and about fermentation as artistic practice and what I call culinary cruising.

Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food

How is food writing a means with which to document environmental change? This question has been keeping me busy for years and so I’m excited to share the essay that attempts to answer it, “‘The Bitter Taste of Extinction’: Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food,” which was just published in The Literary Journalist as a Naturalist.

Edited by Pablo Calvi, this book is a scholarly anthology that proposes a deep discussion about the multiple ways in which narrative journalism has portrayed nature, human interactions with nature, and the global actions that have attempted to explore it, exploit it, harness it, dominate it, and protect it. This essay collection, in short, offers an academic framework for literary journalistic narratives about nature, and it was a delight to contribute a piece that both critiques and celebrates food writing as a genre.

Stew of the Earth

Furnas, in the Portuguese Azores Islands, is a steam bath of a town. Here the water is hot enough to boil tea and simmer stew. What does treating these underground hot springs like an oven or a crockpot say about the relationship between ingredients and energy and being ecological? Between recipes and the earth?

Writing “Stew of the Earth” for the sixth issue of Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review was (almost) as fun as running my fingers through steaming hot water, boiled directly in the earth. Many thanks to my former colleague Pauline Kargruber for so thoughtfully shepherding this essay.

Codscapes, Found and Lost at Culinaria

In his 1997 bestseller, writer Mark Kurlansky called cod “the fish that changed the world.” But how has the world changed cod? Next Wednesday I will be proposing answers to this question at the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto—a delight times two since this will be my very first talk in my hometown.

One part lecture and one part cooking demonstration, I will share fishy fragments—always dried, mostly salted, and sometimes frozen—from Norway to the Mediterranean and from Newfoundland to the Caribbean to probe the relationship between eating and ecology, between distance and disaster. Find out more and register here.

And many thank to Ethan Murphy for lending me Abandoned Room from his series where the light shines first.

The Last Course

Continually stretching out the culinary trinity of appetizer, main, and dessert, fine dining keeps halving the distance between one course and the next. As soon as the mouth makes one dish disappear, another one appears. And then another one, and another one. Even when a last bite comes into sight, the race goes on, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise.

Many thanks to Berlin Review for inviting me to take on fine dining’s past and present in its sixth issue. “The Last Course” begins with fire and ends with the future, stopping for coffee along the way.

Making Fish on Fogo Island

This fall I’m following the cod to Newfoundland, where I have the great privilege of calling myself the food historian in-residence at Fogo Island Arts as part of its Labrador Current Foodways program (a sentence that causes me to pause and pinch myself no matter how many times I repeat it).

The last weekend of September, Fogo Island Arts is organizing Shore Time: a biannual gathering that celebrates the interaction of art and design, economy and ecology, and, of course, foodways. As part of its program of talks and hikes, exhibitions and meals, I’m looking forward to being in conversation with Timothy Charles, the executive chef of Fogo Island Inn, and Jason Murphy, the foodways advisor to Shorefast, as part of the Fishery Food Circle on 27 September.

Atlantic Appetites: A Culinary Conversation with Rafram Chaddad

How do fish, the culture of their catch, and their preparation create and change Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds? As part of the Water & Sound Festival der Kulturen, I’m chuffed to rehearse answers to this question in dialogue with the artist Rafram Chaddad. Join us in Augsburg on Friday 2 August for stories and snacks about Atlantic cod: “the fish that changed the world.”

Our conversation will weave together tales about cod, movement and migration, cuisine and belonging, and will end with a tasting, both with and without fish. Find out more about Atlantic Appetites here.

Deadlines, Conferences, and Other Disasters

How much distance separates a proposal from a paper? What makes a deadline easy to ignore? And why do so many writers major in procrastination?

Arts of the Working Class, a multi-lingual street journal that examines poverty and wealth, art and society, is a medium and a platform committed to creating sustainable connections between artists, academics, and institutions of all kinds with the most vulnerable members of society. They are also both a guest and a host at EASA Barcelona 2024—the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. In anticipation of their workshop “Flipping the Coin(ed),” it was great fun to have had the opportunity to reflect on deadlines, conferences, and other disasters. Read my essay here.

Happy birthday, Caesar salad!

Today, on 4 July 2024, Caesar salad turns 100 years old. Well, kind of. Like the anchovies that make its dressing so much more than the sum of its parts, the stories about the origins of America’s most famous salad are slippery.

On the eve of this iconic salad’s birthday, the French newspaper Le Figaro interviewed me to find out more about the reporting I did for my 2019 article“The Surprising Truth About Caesar Salad” for BBC Travel.

Find the feature, penned by Alice Bosio, in the 3 July 2024 print edition of Le Figaro.

The Sparkling Queen of Rheinhessen

At the beginning of April, just as the first buds were about to poke out their heads and make promises about future blossoms, I travelled to Flonheim, Rheinhessen. There I interviewed Alanna LaGamba who, like me, is from Toronto, but, unlike me, is an impressive winemaker. It was a treat to meet her and learn more about how she accidentally moved to the countryside and started making wine, and even more so because the talented Vivi D’Angelo, together with her camera, joined us.

Many thanks to Pellicle for giving our conversation a home, which you can read here.

Codscapes and Culinary Knots

I’m delighted to have been invited to give a talk Monday 20 May by the “The Environmental Afterlives of the Suez Canal” research project based at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Karin Ahlberg, the project’s director, will generously serve as the discussant.

When a fish disappears, what happens to the chips that accompany it? How does the relationship between eating and ecology ebb and flow? And how do cuisines spark and, then, respond to environmental transformations? These questions set up my talk “Codscapes and Culinary Knots,”which will introduce the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group at the University of Augsburg.

Caviar with Chef Nobu

The chefs I’m used to chatting with don’t have Robert De Niro on speed dial. Nor do their names signify a global restaurant empire worth millions. And so when Highsnobiety invited me to interview celebrity sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa last month when he was the star at the Shibuya Crossing Party at the Mandarin Oriental Munich, I couldn’t say no.

Sure, I expected the kind of show-off ingredients that the well-heeled are suckers for—your caviar and champagne, your truffles and once-endangered bluefin tuna—but I didn’t anticipate to talk shop with Nobu about Greek salad and how size (and texture) matters when it comes to feta. Read about my Nobu night here.

Wine, Territory, and Indigenous Land

I may be a food cultural historian, but I have the ambition to moonlight as a wine writer and so I am thrilled for the opportunity to blend both by participating in my very first wine studies (!) workshop.

Hosted next week by the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, “Wine Place Space: Global Geographies of Wine Cultivation, Production, and Consumption” will discuss how global networks have swayed the spatial configurations of wine production in tandem with how such shifts shade how wine tangles with identities and imaginaries. My paper “Notes On Wine and Settler Colonialism, On Territory and Indigenous Land” will consider, on the one hand, how wine spreads selective ideas of culture and conquest and, on the other, how Indigenous wineries such as Nk’Mip Cellars have come to express long-standing relationships to their lands through a glass of pinot blanc or a bottle of merlot.

"A Cuisine and its Formulas" at the University of Gastronomic Sciences

As a food studies scholar, a trip to Pollenzo feels nothing short of a pilgrimage and so I am chuffed that next week I will tour there to teach a guest seminar in the Master in New Food Thinking program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

Titled “A Cuisine and its Formulas: Recipes, Time, and Culinary Ghosts,” the two day seminar attends to a recipe’s many lives—from a particular prescription to an open-ended provocation and from a historical archive to an artistic medium. The first day—“Beginnings and Endings”—addresses eating and ecology, the construction of culinary geography, and menus as narratives. And the second—“A Rose is a Rose is an Artichoke”—takes up culinary extinction, the discourses of substitutions, and cuisine as a creative practice. 

Minor (but many) menu complaints

A well-written menu, argues writer Anne Thériault, “can feel like a piece of literature in and of itself.” And part of the pleasure, she asserts, is the menu’s physicality—the weight of its paper and the texture of its grains, of requiring your eyes to scan rather than for your fingers to scroll. Another pleasure was chatting with her about menus as historical archives that remember and preserve dishes and meals from appetites past. Read her shrewd article “Please Don’t Make Me Use Another QR Code Restaurant Menu” in The Walrus.

To Steal a Fish

There is nothing I fancy more than returning to my favourite city in the world, and so to return next week for “Stories Come to Matter: Water, Food, and Other Entanglements” only doubles that delight.

Hosted by NICHE, the conference aims to enrich the discussion around the intricate interrelations between discourse and matter. Its goal is to highlight the values of stories and imagination and, in doing so, outline the vast network of agencies that dominate our material world. More specifically, it considers water and food as critical examples of how matters intertwine with meaning.

My presentation departs from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, Hot Milk, where the sun is always blazing. Sofia escorts her mother to Spain in search of a cure for paralysis. But the clinic also diagnoses Sofia's lack of courage and instructs her to steal a fish. At Almería’s market Sofia pokes the mouth of a monkfish and considers sardines and tuna before she slides a dorado into her basket. To steal a fish is the doctor’s prescription for acquiring boldness. Here she steals from the market, but what role does the sea itself—the water—play in this theft? What else might it mean to steal a fish and what worlds do fish story? In dialogue with my research about the intersections between cod and colonization, climate and crisis, "To Steal a Fish: Cod Tales and Colonial Knots" weaves together material, textual, and geographical fragments to tell global cod tales.

A Window, A Mountain, A Scape

This fall I had the pleasure of joining the Editorial Collective of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation. Published open-access, the journal champions articles that are as diverse and entangled as the subject of food itself, providing critical perspectives on the ways in which humans, vittles, and environments construct one another.

And it was another pleasure still to have penned the opening words for the journal’s latest issue: “A Window, A Mountain, A Scape.” Read my editorial here and the whole issue here.

Old Salt and Fresh Fish

Initiated last semester by the Environmental Science Centre and open to the public, the Green Hour spotlights current research in the environmental humanities by invited guests alongside scholars from the University of Augsburg. I am most look forward to opening this semester’s series of discussions next Thursday with my talk Old Salt and Fresh Fish: Introducing the Culinary Environmental Humanities.

Whether a main, a side, or even a snack, a dish narrates how appetites and environments entangle and clash. Considering how history seasons contemporary foodways, this talk introduces the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group at the University of Augsburg and its aim in advancing the “culinary environmental humanities.” Departing from the intersections between cod and colonization, climate and crisis, Old Salt and Fresh Fish will weave together slippery stories about the intimate relationship between eating and ecology to ask: How does a recipe trace the contours of local environments and, in contrast, how do culinary cultures draw beyond these borders?

Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows

Next week the Institute of European Cultural History at the University of Augsburg is hosting the workshop Water Cultures and it is an honour that I will open the program with my lecture “Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows: Towards a Bluer Humanities.”

What colour are the humanities? Or, perhaps, it is better to rephrase this question to highlight the possibilities of the plural rather than the rule of the singular. So, to try again, what colours are the humanities? The emergence of “the blue humanities” suggests that colour matters. John R. Gillis, for instance, argued that history has largely been a landlocked field. Scholars have traditionally started and ended their narratives on land, rendering the water and ice and slush and wetlands in between a “blue hole.” But blue only captures certain imaginations of water. What happens if you replace colour with wetness? How slippery are the humanities? How damp and how humid? In dialogue with these questions, “Streams and Floods, Ripples and Flows: Towards a Blue Humanities” will both think with and beyond colour to survey the emergence of the academic and creative discourse over the past two decades that places water and wetness—and their many forms—at the centre of its attention.

The question of water-related knowledge, attributions, communications and patterns of interpretation is at the centre of a cooperation between the universities of Amiens and Augsburg, with the participation of academics from Bayreuth and Abomey. The workshop in Augsburg is a continuation of a scholarly exchange that began in Amiens in May 2023. Find out more about the workshop and the rest of the program here.

Extinction, Endangerment, and Environmental Storytelling

What kind of narratives are mobilized when recounting, remembering, and highlighting extinction and the endangerment of nonhumans? Hosted by the Stavanger Art Museum and organized by the project “Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums” in cooperation with the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, this week I am looking forward to participating in the “Extinction, Endangerment, and Environmental Storytelling” Workshop.

Titled “Turtle Soup: The Ghost of Appetites Past,” my paper provides soup for thought by asking: How do appetites both cause and chart environmental loss? And what role do cuisines play in sharing stories about plants, animals, and the environment at large? Browse the rest of the program here.