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.
Image by Justin Langlois
C Magazine: Gather
What does it mean to gather at a time when a pandemic has postponed so many gatherings?
The autumn 2020 issue of C Magazine asks what the word gather means as its very core, ”not just for us humans, but all of ‘us’—stones, gravestones, Prairie grass, comets, seeds, travelling envelopes, berries, buried jugs of water, frozen pixels, iridescent sheets of acetate, bees—who comprise the many concentric circles of our shared world.”
How might collections of recipes—including ones penned by artists—serve as venues for communication, ways to gather? How do recipes connect people, plants, and places, both near and afar?
For C Magazine’s “Gather” issue, I am thrilled to have contributed the essay “Cooking the Books: Recipes by Artists.” Read more about the issue here, and the editorial here.
Environmental Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship
I am chuffed to be joining the Center for the Humanities & Social Change at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia as an environmental humanities postdoctoral fellow.
You can follow the Center’s activities here and read about my new research project - about culinary reactions to climate change - here.
Food in the Time of COVID-19
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.
Dana Claxton in collaboration with Sean Griffin, Muckamuck Strike Then and Now, 2018. Courtesy of the artists.
Food & Power: Vancouver's The Muckamuck
The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery has published its 2019 proceedings—Food & Power—and I am delighted to have contributed the chapter “The Muckamuck: Restaurants, Labour, and the Power of Representation.”
How do restaurants express political and cultural power structures? By narrating the history of the Muckamuck Restaurant in Vancouver, one of the first Indigenous-themed eateries in Canada, my essay discusses restaurants as venues for cultural representation.
Opened in 1971 by three settlers and closed in 1981 because of a labour dispute, the Muckamuck is a compelling example of how restaurants are entangled with issues of power. This essay weaves together a discussion of the restaurant’s dishes, its three-year picket line, and contemporary artworks about the Muckamuck’s legacy for Indigenous self determination in the 2018 exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts.
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.
How Teaching in Germany Has Shaped How I See Canada
As we are all huddled in our nation states trying to slow the spread of COVID-19, I have been reflecting on when a landscape feels more like home than a country and what it is like to teach about the place you’re from when it is an ocean away. Many thanks to NiCHE (The Network in Canadian History & Environment) for letting me share my thoughts, which you can read here.
Whose Museum x KRETS, September 29, 2019
As part of Malmö Gallery Night 2019, I am thrilled to be joining artists Louise Waite and ieke Trinks for an evening of bread and soup, sounds and performances. Find out more about Chapter 4 of Whose Museum x KRETS here, and join us from 6pm to midnight on Saturday September 29, 2019.
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.
Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery
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
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.
Pass the Squirrel
“When a food comes back, we should understand why it went away,” writes American journalist Gabe Bullard. His article “Bushy Tails and Old Cookbooks” traces the rise and fall of squirrel in the American culinary canon—and now its unexpected return. He asked me about fashions in food and forgetting, and we chatted about the relationship between what we eat and where we are. Read his article for The Bitter Southerner here.
Restaurants & Reconciliation: Talk at UC Berkeley
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
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
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.
Vínarterta: Stories of Migration, Tradition and Cake
The first Sunday of December, I’m heading to the German capital to bake my favourite Christmas cake and chat about migration, tradition, and how a recipe is so much more than “authentic.” Join me for a slice of vínarterta at Berlin’s Contemporary Food Lab.
A Tomato Grows in Iceland
The fall issue of Chickpea is out today, for which I wrote about Icelandic tomatoes and the excellent Bloody Mary they make (which tastes especially good before noon).