It is a joy to return to my alma mater, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, as its new editorial director.
Read more about the RCC and its many activities here.
Citrus and Seasonal Nostalgia
Based in New York, Salt & Pepper is a literary magazine about food, with recipes. It publishes both fiction and nonfiction and recipes accompany all of its stories. Quite literally providing food for thought, it aims to shed the one-time-read nature of literary magazines by including recipes that can become staples in your kitchen.
A magazine that leaves the bookshelf or coffee table and takes residence next to your stove.
Its latest issue explores nostalgia and its many flavours. It is a great pleasure to have my musings included and to write about citrus, Venice, and (confused) seasonal nostalgia. With recipes of course. One sweet (Blood Oranges and Honey Pistachios) and one savoury (Kumquat Salsa Verde).
Preview the issue here.
ASFS Member Spotlight
Photo of L. Sasha Gora by Vivi D’Angelo for Das Blaue Wunder, Munich
Founded in 1985, the ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) is a lively community of scholars promoting the interdisciplinary study of food.
It was a delight to speak with Alanna K. Higgins, who interviewed me for the ASFS’s Member Spotlight series. We discussed my research, advice for an international career, climate change, public scholarship, and my favourite knife.
Read the interview here.
Planting a Menu
Can lunch be a lecture? How do eating and research practices intersect? And what can a recipe reveal about plants beyond human appetites?
I’m looking forward to STREAMS: Transformative Environmental Humanities, which kicks off tomorrow online. I am pleased to be participating in a stream organized by Anna Svensson, titled “A Green Turn? How plants are shaping the Environmental Humanities landscape.” I will be presenting the paper “Planting a Menu: An Edible Essay.” Find out more about the conference here.
The Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award
I am over the moon to have received this year’s Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award. Vielen, vielen Dank!
It is an immense honour to have my doctoral dissertation “Culinary Claims: A Cultural History of Indigenous Restaurants in Canada” recognized by the BAA and I am most grateful for its support.
Memory and Culinary Conflicts
From layers to waves, memories overlap, pile-up, and even sink under all of this weight. In dialogue with these layers of overlap, the Memory Studies Association Fifth Annual Conference is titled “Convergences.” Taking place online from July 5-9, the city of Warsaw is its host and provides an environment that illuminates the program. How do the local practices, traditions, and studies compare to the global ones? And how does the intertwining of human and non-human, digital and analog affect our memories?
I am pleased to be participating in one of two conference panels dedicated to “Fractured Memory of the Colonial Encounter: Canada and the Indigenous Present.” The paper I will present is titled “Culinary Conflicts: Memory, Indigenous Restaurants, and Cultural Encounters.”
Find more about the conference here.
Un/Known Urban Natures
Based on two years of lively discussions, the Urban Environments Initiative is hosting an online conference from June 30 to July 2: Irritations and Unforeseen Consequences of the Urban.
I’m delighted to be part of Working Group 1: Un/Known Urban Natures. Together with Raúl Acosta, Joseph Adeniran Adedeji, Maan Barua, Matthew Gandy, and Kara Schlichting, we will be discussing the various layers of urban nature that coexist in cities around the world.
I will be discussing water, colour, and perceptions of urban nature in Venice, Italy.
Find out more about the conference, including the program and registration link, here.
Eating with the Lagoon
Established by TBA21–Academy and appropriately based in Venice, Ocean Space hosts exhibitions, research, and public programs that catalyze ocean literacy through the arts.
It is an immense pleasure to be collaborating with chef Marco Bravetti and food designer Katinka Versendaal on an event in partnership with Ocean Space and the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.
A recipe for salt calls for two ingredients: the sea and the sun. But what is the recipe for Venice? The city of Venice emerged from salt marshes—from the labor of tides carrying seawater back and forth, in and out. As a “forest on the sea,” Venice is a balancing act and salt knows a thing or two about balance. Salt executes order. It conducts how an ingredient behaves. Too little and even a confident legume tastes like something is missing. Too much and drought spreads across the mouth. The human appetite for salt, as the anthropologist Margaret Visser points out, reveals that we are in fact “walking marine environments.” The sea in our mouths. The lagoon on our tongues. But as much as salt preserves—keeping ingredients in line and flavors in balance—it also damages and erodes. In dialogue with salt’s duality, Ciacoe in Tocio: Idee, Conversazioni, e Sughi per Mangiare con la Laguna (Ideas, Conversations, and Sauces for Eating with the Lagoon) draws from Venice’s past and present to reimagine its future.
An afternoon of culinary conversations, this event casts food as a critical means with which to experience Venice and its lagoon. The table becomes a laboratory for understanding and shaping saltwater worlds and coastal futures. Eating becomes a method of inquiry.
Calling for a move away from an exclusive focus on terrestrial food politics, cultural studies scholar Elspeth Probyn asks: “can we eat with the ocean?” She wonders: “How to eat the ocean well?” We speculate answers to these questions. Can Venice eat with the lagoon?
Find out more about the June 20 event and book a seat here.
The Tourist Trap: Culinary Imaginations of Venice
From June 9-15, four food studies organizations have joined forces to host an impressive and important online conference: Just Food: because it is never just food. Centred on the theme of Food Justice, the programme is rich in much urgent food for thought.
I’m excited to be part of a panel discussing culinary tourism. Moderated by Beth Forrest, I am in excellent company and am thrilled to be sharing this panel with Shayan Lallani (presenting on cosmopolitan cruise ship dining), Lucy Long (presenting on virtual tourism in the time of COVID-19), Jonatan Leer (presenting on sustainable food tourism with a focus on the Nordic region), and Michelle-Marie Gilkeson (presenting on sensory devices in food-focused travel shows). My paper discusses (over)tourism, restaurants, and the weight of culinary imaginations of Venice.
Find out more about the conference here.
Happy as a Clam: Clichés, Climate, and Cuisine
Detail from “Venezia Riparte” by Gianmarco Toma, 2020
Next Friday, May 28, I’m delighted to be presenting my research as part of the Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series - V hosted by the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Eating is one of the most direct ways humans interact with environments by literally digesting them. Food history, thus, reveals how everyday eating practices not only reproduce cultural imaginations of landscapes but also shape actual environments. Narrowing in on seafood, this seminar asks: how do human appetites transform, harm, but also perhaps heal watery worlds? It aims to serve examples of the kinds of stories that food can tell. Spotlighting both Venice and Venice-in-the-world, it assembles a cast of fish and shellfish to consider the relationship between food and place, between ritual and cliché, and between cuisine and climate.
Find more details and the registration instructions here.
Food eats the Soul / Essen essen Seele auf
Published for the streets of the world, Arts of the Working Class is a journal for art and society, poverty and wealth.
One part birthday cake, its latest issue celebrates three years of multilingual publishing by and for the working class, meaning everyone. An icing-covered issue dedicated to the poetic and physical forms of nourishment, ingestion, and metabolisms.
I’m thrilled to join the party with “Secret Ingredient: Food, Knowledge, and Migration.” Read more about Issue 16 Food eats the Soul / Essen essen Seele auf here.
Lucia Petrali Castaldi, La piccola cuoca. Vallardi, 1909. Courtesy of Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo, Turin
The Poetics and Politics of Porridge
Next week Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is hosting the conference Food and/in Children’s Culture: National, International and Transnational Perspectives. One of the advantages of the pandemic pushing everything online is that all are welcome to join, to “zoom in.”
I am looking forward to presenting the paper “‘Sad ol’ mush’: The Poetics and Politics of Porridge in Residential Schools in Canada.” Registration is currently open (and free!). Find out more about the conference here and the programme here.
"The wet stuff that matters most"
Just in time for World Water Day, Riot and Roux!—an independent quarterly publication that explores the intersections of food, power, and social change—released its second issue. And its all about “the wet stuff that matters most: WATER!”
In honour of worlds that are equally salty as they are wet, I wrote about oysters, the power of words and names, and settler colonialism in a piece titled “Self-Portrait, with Shellfish.” Preview the issue here.
Nectarine Magazine: The Dreams Issue
My childhood obsession with dioramas and miniature models has matured into an adult obsession with still lifes (and is probably the reason why I have a degree in museum studies). Sharing this obsession is Nectarine Magazine. Based in Los Angeles, it celebrates juicy still life imagery with heart and soul.
Its latest number—The Dreams Issue—is out now and I’m chuffed to have written about fake flora, dreams of flowers that live forever, and living across the water from Venice’s cemetery island.
Make sure to watch the issue’s dreamy companion video: Busby Berkeley Dream.
Unusual Encounters with Food
Based in Berlin, Food& is an experimental publishing project that explores unusual encounters with food. From losers to bathrooms and from nuclear war to love, each issue pairs food with an unexpected partner. The latest issue—out now—takes a far out approach: Food& Gravity.
It was great fun to have followed the theme’s pull, and I’m happy to have contributed the text “Sunny Side Up.” Preview the issue here.
Compound Butter: The Comfort Issue
Published biannually, Compound Butter explores food, art, and all the things in between. Its latest issue is about all things comfort—something the whole world needs as we continue to stay at home (again!) and wait out the rest of COVID-19’s reign.
I’m elated to have contributed the text “States of Undress,” in which I got to wax poetic about my definition of (non-edible) comfort—bathrobes, yes, bathrobes—and praise some of their most iconic cinematic appearances.
Take a look at issue fourteen: COMFORT here.
'No Useless Mouth'
I am delighted to have reviewed Rachel B. Herrmann’s fine book No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution for the latest issue of Environmental History. (Brilliantly, the book is open access and available to download here.)
Find the review here.
Urban Environments Initiative: "Food, Cities, and Environments"
The Urban Environments Initiative is an exciting collaborative project between the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), the Technische Universität München (TUM), the University of Cambridge, and New York University. It looks at urban environmental issues, and I am delighted to be a part of it.
Hot off the press, read the positions papers here and my contribution—“‘Urban Soup’: Food, Cities, and Environments”—here.
The Preserve Journal
An independent magazine, The Preserve Journal explores “a more sustainable, responsible, and resilient food culture.”
Based in Copenhagen, it tells stories from around the world, and for its latest issue I am so pleased to share a story about “the sparrow that turn salmon” and the exciting art practice of London-based Cooking Sections. The article profiles their ongoing project CLIMAVORE, and its title matches an exhibition Cooking Sections just opened at Tate Britain titled Salmon: A Red Herring.
Take a peak at issue 4 here.
Foods We've "Loved to Death"
I had the pleasure of reviewing Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman for the winter 2020 issue of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies
Take a look at the latest Gastronomica issue here and my review here.