Appetites and Other Ghosts

In a 1996 article in The New Yorker, Susan Orlean chronicles what she calls “the homesick restaurant.” It isn’t her homesickness she refers to. In contrast to those frequenting a restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana—one that remembers the one they left behind—she confesses, “There has never been anything in my life that I couldn't go back to if I really wanted to.” The restaurant she writes about serves those who are homesick for a different place, a different time. But what if we add up those different places and times so that they equal environments, so that the sum they make is the planet?

I am looking forward to tackling this question next week at KWI, where I will present my research as part of its Wednesday Colloquium. My talk will consider extinction through a culinary lens. Zooming in on substitutions—their practices, discourses, and politics—I ask: How do cuisines chart, mourn, and perhaps even aim to counter environmental loss? Appetites and Other Ghosts will survey my current work on the relationships between restaurants and politics, food and migration, and cuisine and planetary health.

The Colloquium is hybrid, which means that all are welcome to join online. Find out more and register here.

Let Them Eat Cake Mix

The fog falls like lace. It obscures any chance of a clear line that separates land from water, water from sky. A woman wades through the mud with a bucket and thick rubber gloves. She walks toward a crowd knee-deep in the water net fishing for salmon. This image sets the scene of journalist and food writer Julia O’Malley’s The Whale and the Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska.

It also accompanies the book’s introduction: “What Why How We Eat.” No question mark, no punctuation. It does, however, reveal the picture’s GPS: “There is most likely no more democratic fishing spot in America than Kenai, Alaska,” claims O’Malley. An estimated ninety thousand people across the state annually share four hundred thousand sockeye, the majority of which come from the Kenai.

I had the pleasure of reviewing The Whale and the Cupcake for H-Net. Read the rest of the review here.

Life, Death, and Dinner Among the Molluscs

Food systems need to shift, but how? How might we shape them to nourish humans, animals, and the planet? Edited by Kathleen Kevany and Paolo Prosperi, Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets takes these questions to task and gathers 55 chapters that illuminate solutions on environment, health, and well-being, education and public engagement, political processes, and creative approaches to social policies and purposeful design of food environments.

I’m pleased to have had the chance to spotlight shellfish in my chapter “Life, Death, and Dinner Among the Molluscs: Human Appetites and Sustainable Aquaculture.”

This is an absolute meal of a book, which the price unfortunately reflects. And so I would encourage you to ask your local library to order the e-book or pre-order the hardback so that is is available to many. Find out more here.

Wheatscapes and Culinary Ghosts

For my final act at Delfina Foundation for Season 5 of The Politics of Food, it is a delight to be part of a collective event with my fellow international resident Maya Marshak and our invited collaborator David Bates. Together the three of us will explore the idea of environmental and culinary ghosts through the mediums of paint, moving image, a lecture presentation, and the sharing of food on Wednesday 14 December.

This multi-part evening opens with a viewing of the first iteration of Maya Marshak’s work Vision Fields. Produced during her residency, this mural, comprised of painting and moving image projection, is an outcome of her research in South Africa and the UK around lost agroecological knowledges.

Following the viewing, I will deliver a lecture titled Down the Wrong Way: Toward an Environmental History of Cuisine, considering the idea of culinary extinction through the ways recipes map how cultures eat and adapt to the worlds around them.

Responding to the themes of environmental and culinary ghosts explored in our work, David Bates will then present and share with guests a series of home-baked sourdough breads, each made from a different type of wheat. To bring the event to a close, I will offer a “mock mock turtle soup,” as featured in my lecture.

To book a seat and for further information, see here.

Polyphonic Bodies II

It is a great joy that I will return to London in December for the final month of Season 5 of Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food programme. And it is even more of a joy to collaborate with Delfina resident & Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow Erin Li and chef SongSoo Kim on an event at Asymmetry Art Foundation on Sunday 10 December.

Playing with forms of hospitality and co-existence, this communal tasting aims to nurture a curious yet welcoming social situation that breaks down the boundaries and conventions of the collective meal – which is to say a script of courses, a hierarchy of seating, and a repertoire of flavours organised according to national allegiances.

Polyphonic Bodies II instead serves an edible landscape and invites visitors to graze, “forage”, and freely combine bites, the process of which catalyses connections and conversations related to biodiversity, cultural plurality, the climate crisis, and the generosity of the bacteria that choreographs good health and pleasure.

Tickets are free and available here. This curated tasting is in dialogue with Erin Li’s Polyphonic Bodies “Gallery Takeover” at Whitechapel on 1 December.

Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide

What does Venice look like when observed from the perspective of climate change, environmental collapse, and human-animal relations in an age of industrialization and mass extinction? That is, as a privileged observatory of the Anthropocene?

Published by wetlands and edited by Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani, and Pietro Omodeo, this guidebook is intended as a tool for learning about the city in a new way. Venice emerges here as a unique ecosystem at risk, but also as a key to understanding our increasingly vulnerable world.

What stories of extinction lie behind local delicacies like baccalà mantecato? It was a pleasure to pose this question in the chapter “Baccalà in Venice, Cod in the World.”

The book is available, as of today, in both English and Italian editions.

Salt Stains: The Delfina Sessions

Initiated in January 2021, The Delfina Sessions is Delfina Foundation’s show on Radio Alhara, featuring sets from alumni as well as guest contributors across the world.

The shows are broadcast live from Bethlehem on the third Tuesday of every month at 6pm local time (4pm UK time and 5pm CET). Today kicks off the first session of a three part series spotlighting season 5 of The Politics of Food and it is a honour that my essay “Salt Stains: Appetites and Extinction” will start things off. Listen live today or on Delfina Foundation’s website.

Where is the Planetary?

How could collaboration maintain a habitable planet? What concepts of the world underlie political and social approaches to a transforming Earth system? How can a variety of worldviews be transformed into shared planetary-scale practices that could address the current challenges?

A gathering hosted by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in collaboration with the artist Koki Tanaka, Where is the Planetary? is a collective search for models of living together on Earth. Following five central questions, researchers, artists, and activists seek ways to transform the multitude of perspectives and cosmologies into a common agency.

This week I am excited to participate in Episode 1, which asks: What are the conditions for habitability?

Where is the Planetary? is a three-day event, running from 14 to 16 October. Find out more and browse the event schedule here.

Throughlines: Anthropocene Curriculum

Which legacies—material, geological, biological, and social—have come to form the Anthropocene? What will the legacy of the Anthropocene be? What lines or connections can be traced through the entangled web of agencies and interactions that characterize the Anthropocene?

In answer to these questions, I had the pleasure of curating a course for the Anthropocene Curriculum. Part of Course 6, titled “Thoroughlines,” my pathway explores domestic practices of care—cooking and cleaning—as a throughline to a better future.

It was a delight to contribute to this project and to pen a key contribution. My essay ”Moths, Flames, and Other Attractions” takes a moth-eaten dress as a starting point for a meditation on eating and care. Weaving together critical food studies, personal anecdote, nonhuman perspectives, and story-telling, it thinks about how modes of consumption connect us with other beings and the planet, as well as to the past and the future.

KWI Essen International Fellowship

I am thrilled to be joining KWI Essen as an international fellow in October 2022. The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany, is an interdisciplinary research centre. The reflection of cultural studies is at the center of its work: What can it mean today to do cultural studies between disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily organized knowledge formations? What expectations and requirements regarding relevance and sense-making are they confronted with? How are their forms of criticism and comment defined; their routines of reading and writing, showing, telling and arguing?

It is a treat to be in such inspiring and accomplished company. Read more about the fifth cohort of KWI international fellows here.

A Cuisine of its Own: Food History Seminar at IHR London

Launched at the Institute of Historical Research in summer 2017, the Food History Seminar provides an inclusive setting in which food historians, academics, and experts working in related fields can come together to discuss their research.

The 2022 Autumn Term begins next week and I am delighted to be giving the first talk, titled “A Cuisine of its Own: Culinary Colonialism in Canada.”

What is Canadian cuisine and how does it differ from Indigenous fare? Early settlers in the lands now known as Canada were initially dependent on Indigenous foodways, only then to replace them with European flora and fauna, the likes of wheat, cows, and pigs. But later, when the country chiselled out an identity of its own—one distinct from Britain—, Canadian visual imagery drew from and reimagined Indigenous motifs. Then, on the occasion of Canada’s centennial, as celebrated by Montreal’s Expo 67, La Toundra—the host country’s official restaurant—claimed Indigenous ingredients as Canadian. Providing an overview of this entangled history, this talk will draw from my book project Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada.

Please join me on Zoom Thursday 6 October at 5:30 pm (BST). More details are available here. The talk is free for all to attend, but advanced booking is required.

"Sad Ol Mush": Childhood in the Past

How does breakfast connect to larger conflicts over land and power? And what role does children’s culture play in this?

After having organized the conference Food and/in Children’s Culture: National, International and Transnational Perspectives, literary scholars Anna Gasperini and Laura Tossi have kept the conversation going by curating a special issue of Childhood in the Past. It is a pleasure to have been a part of this project and to have contributed the article “‘Sad Ol Mush’: The Poetics and Politics of Porridge in Residential Schools in Canada.”

My article has just been published. Browse and read the rest of the special issue “Childhood and Food: Literary-Historical Perspectives (c. 19-20th centuries) here.

The Politics of Food

Based in London, Delfina Foundation introduced its thematic programme The Politics of Food in 2014. Since then it has hosted four seasons, which have focused on themes such as sex, diet, and disaster; adapting; and markets and movement.

Autumn 2022 marks the programme’s fifth season and it turns its attention to the climate emergency. I most excited to be participating as one of its residents. During my month in London, I will be exploring culinary substitutions, their practices, discourses, and politics. Read more about my upcoming residency and the excellent company I look forward to collaborating with.

Labrador Current Foodways Residency

It is an absolute honour to share that I have been awarded a Labrador Current Foodways Residency at Fogo Island Arts. Rooted in Fogo Island’s unique geography, the residency explores the interconnectedness of food with our histories, ecologies, economies, politics and social worlds. I cannot wait to follow the cod to Fogo, Newfoundland, in 2023!

Read the announcement to learn more about the residency and the inspiring practitioners that I am lucky to be in the company of: Marta Arzak, Cooking Sections, Taus Makhacheva, and Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa.

Food Movements, Moving Food, and Unbordering

How can we better understand food practices by viewing them through the lens of movement? Entitled Food Movements / Moving Food , Umbra’s 2022 Biennial Conference on Food, Sustainability, and Environment addresses what happens when people and food products move through regional, national, and international networks.

What are the effects of these movements on local, regional, national, and international communities and cultures? What additional actions and reactions do they precipitate?

The conference aims to respond to such questions in Perugia, Italy, June 9 to 12. I am delighted to be chairing the “Migration” panel. I will also present the paper “Unbordering a Movement: Indigenous Chefs and State Lines.” What happens when political boundaries influence the movement of ingredients? And what happens when these borders police whom may travel and with what? What are the culinary and political consequences? Focusing on the lands now called Canada and the United States, my paper traces the ways state, provincial, and national borders influence the contemporary Indigenous Food Movement. I also map how Indigenous chefs, restaurateurs, and caterers resist these borders.

Today's Special: Reading Menus as Cultural Texts

What is food? A thing we eat, a creator of cultures, an all-encompassing system? An object, a process, a way of understanding ourselves? A way to altogether reimagine study and practice in the first place?

Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement is a new open-access textbook. Speaking to early undergraduate learners, it brings together 60 chapters that cover themes ranging from cultural identity to the financialization of food, breastfeeding to the foodways of rural Kyrgyzstan, eating disorders to backyard chicken farming.

I had the pleasure of contributing a chapter that draws from my experience teaching food studies at LMU Munich. Each of my classes assigns a menu analysis. But how can you look beyond your own appetite in order to read menus as cultural texts? “Today’s Special” answers this question. And this video offers a preview of my chapter.

Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement is available for free online, both as a PDF and as an e-publication.

"The Bitter Taste of Extinction"

How is food writing a means for environmental activism? In answer to this question, I’m pleased to be presenting a paper at the American Society for Environmental History’s 2022 Conference.

Titled “‘The Bitter Taste of Extinction’: Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food,” my paper considers how American food writing represents, activates, or seeks to preserve the environment by surveying the genre’s growing environmental consciousness.

The conference takes place in Eugene, Oregon, March 23 to 27. Learn more about it here.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Eaten Magazine - an independent magazine celebrating the history of food - has dedicated its latest issue to the most important meal of the day.

Breakfast, as Issue 13 reveals, is full of a veritable buffet of stories to help you start your day, from the evolution of a perfect hangover cure to the invention of the All-American breakfast to the udder-chaos of a milk promotional campaign gone wrong.

I had too much fun writing about how last night’s booze haunts this morning’s breakfast, which is to say the history of the Bloody Mary and other hangover cures. Browse the issue here.

Eating the Future

The future is typically not my business. This is not to say it isn’t of interest but, as a historian, it is not part of my job profile to imagine it. This is why the work of Katinka Versendaal—a food designer and “gastronomic futurologist”—makes me curious. What Katinka proposes with her food design studio—the Eatelier—moves beyond forecasting culinary trends. This is not about looking at the past and using it as a crystal ball to predict future outcomes. Instead, Katinka applies speculative design thinking to gastronomy to ask: is this the future we want?

It was a pleasure to interview Katinka for The Preserve Journal. Preview issue 6 here.

A Seat at the Table

From McDonald’s in Moscow to Starbucks in Shanghai, American food is simply everywhere. But why and how? And beyond being fast, what exactly is American food?

As part of the Atlantische Akademie’s Let’s Talk America series, I am excited to give a talk on Wednesday January 26, titled “A Seat at the Table: Food in America and American Food in the World.” Find out more about the event and register here.