Food in the Time of COVID-19

Gastronomica

How do people feed themselves in times of crisis? What is the role of community and social ties in feeding ourselves, families, the ill, and each other? How has the crisis both highlighted the essential services provided by food workers and the precarity of those services?

In response to these questions, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies just published its August edition: a collection of 59 “dispatches” from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection is impressively global. Some contributions are funny, others sad, and many anxious. However imperfectly, together they document the early months of lockdown and what it has been like to experience the pandemic around the world.

I am honoured to be one of those 59 accounts. Read “Brotzeit: Dispatch from Munich” here and the whole issue here.

Canadian Culinary Imaginations

Canadian Culinary Imaginations

As of today, Canadian Culinary Imaginations is out in the world! Four years in the making, it clocks in at 2 pounds and 412 pages. Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Shelley Boyd - a literary scholar - and Dorothy Barenscott - an art historian - edited this timely collection of fine essays and artworks. And Vancouver-based artist Jay Cabalu crafted its handsome cover.

I am so proud to have contributed a chapter. “From Meat to Metaphor: Beavers and Conflicting Imaginations of the Edible” dives in deep to the culinary history of Canada’s animal emblem.

The book is available in both hardcover and paperback. Read more about the publication here and the symposium behind the project here.

Review of International American Studies

Review of International American Studies

The latest issue of the Review of International American Studies is now out and is dedicated to an issue very near and dear to my own research interests: Indigenous social movements in the Americas.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Paul Freedman’s impressive Ten Restaurants that Changed America. It fills many gaps in America’s overlooked restaurant history. In my review I mention Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone, a reminder that one cannot talk about food culture in North America without acknowledging Indigenous chefs, ingredients, and their influence.

I am delighted to be in excellent company. To name a few, Mariaelena Anali Huambachano has written about Indigenous foodways in Peru, Elizabeth Hoover about fire and the water protectors at Standing Rock, and Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska about food sovereignty efforts in the Oneida Nation.

Read my review here, and the rest of issue here.

Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

Oxford food symposium

This weekend I am delighted to be attending the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery for the second time. This year’s theme is food and power and I am thrilled to be on an absolute power panel titled “Feminism.” Chaired by the great Laura Shapiro, Don Lindgren, an antiquarian bookseller, will speak about American community cookbooks and women’s empowerment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Dr. Alex Ketchum, a professor at McGill University’s Institute of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, will discuss the history of feminist restaurants in Canada and the United States in the 1970s and beyond. I will be presenting the paper “Muckamuck: Restaurants, Labour, and the Power of Represention” about the first Indigenous-themed restaurant in urban Canada.

America's Most Famous Salad was Invented in Mexico

Caesar's Tijuana by L. Sasha Gora

That’s right: the Caesar salad was invented south of the border in Mexico. And I walked from San Diego to Tijuana to eat at the restaurant that first tossed sturdy romaine leaves together with a creamy dressing and called it a Caesar. Read about the history of my favourite culinary cliché over at BBC Travel.

Restaurants & Reconciliation: Talk at UC Berkeley

Berkeley Canadian Studies

Berkeley’s Canadian Studies Program hosts a monthly luncheon colloquium series and I am absolutely thrilled to be giving April’s talk. Titled “Restaurants and Reconciliation: The Representation of Indigenous Foodways in Canada,” I will discuss how restaurants serve so much more than just dinner. Please join me on Tuesday April 2, 2019, from 11:30am to 1pm in 223 Moses Hall.

Paris by Design

Paris by Design. Image by Chaunte Vaughn

Like many, I fell in love with Paris - or even just the idea of Paris - years before I finally arrived at Gare du Nord. Since then I’ll use any excuse to go back and continue this courtship, confident my relationship with the city will always be far more serious than a teenage crush.

And so I am delighted to have contributed to Eva Jorgensen’s Paris by Design: An Inspired Guide to the City’s Creative Side. Together with her husband Kirk, Eva runs what started as a stationary company and has grown into a creative studio: Sycamore Co. It is, of course, no surprise that a paper specialist has put together an inspirited ode to one of the world’s cultural capitals.

Designer and illustrator are only two of the many hats Marin Montagut wears. His love for Paris is as endless as his own creative curiosity and I had great fun interviewing him about flea markets, treasures, and the French capital. The book comes out on April 9. Read more about it here.

California Cooking

California Citrus Park

Dates and dim-sum, salsa and San Francisco sourdough. This past semester I taught a course at the University of Munich called "California Cooking: How the Golden State Changed the Way America Eats.” After four months of talking about foodways in California, and their many histories, I am delighted to have the opportunity to spend the next two months eating (and, of course, cooking, or at least assembling/dicing avocado and segmenting citrus) in the Golden State. Until the end of April 2019, I will be based at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar in the Department of Ethnic Studies.