Editor’s Letter
“Decline, decline, decline. I’m sick of that word,” was the waterman’s gruff response to my question about the downward trend in annual oyster harvests. It was the early 1980s and I was interviewing a skipjack captain1 at a commercial landing as part of my first job in public history. Fresh out of grad school, I was leading a research and documentation project on the history of local fisheries at the Calvert Marine Museum, a regional maritime museum on the Chesapeake Bay, in Maryland. The project, funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was designed to document the working lives of watermen, so-called because they “follow the water,” harvesting the seasonal round of resources in the bay and its complex network of tributaries.2 Called an “immense protein factory” by Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken,3 the Chesapeake’s long history of spectacular hauls of oysters, crabs, clams, finfish, and terrapin was definitely in decline by the 1980s. A combination of pollution and environmental degradation, ruthlessly efficient harvesting technologies, and aggressive harvesting to meet consumer demands had led to the decline and depletion of species like striped bass (rockfish) and oysters, two of the bay’s culinary stars. A major tenet underlying the project itself was that we were witnessing the end of something, the end of viable commercial fisheries—known as “the water business”—on the bay. The museum, which houses collections of gear and workboats as well as aquaria showcasing various marine species, was well positioned to record the twilight of these historically and culturally significant industries. Indeed, the project revealed that rockfish and oysters weren’t the only species in decline. Watermen felt endangered too.
Despite the downward trend borne out by statistics, life went on aboard workboats, in seafood packing houses, and in watermen’s communities. In interviews, many locals preferred to take a long view, describing the current state of things as part of a pattern of abundance and scarcity that had characterized the fisheries for generations. If we were in a valley, just wait until the peaks of plenty returned. And I struggled, too, to reconcile the trajectory of decline with what I encountered every single day: spectacularly beautiful expanses of water observed from landings, bridges, beaches, and boat decks. Where were the rusty pipes dumping sewage into the water? Where were the factories and chemical dumping sites that would account for the declining water quality? Where could I see the noxious processes that were polluting the water and decimating the bay’s seafood resources? That’s when I learned about non-point-source pollution, the widespread run-off from chemically treated lawns and agricultural fields, livestock and poultry waste, highways, suburban parking lots, and similar impermeable surfaces that permitted oil and other pollutants to enter the watershed. The insidious nature of non-point-source pollution brought home the complexities of ecosystems and the arduous work of trying to change human behaviors to protect the marine environment and coastal communities when all seemed fine on the surface. While my interviews touched on these issues, the stories watermen and their families were eager to tell were about the centrality of water, and the water business, to their lives.4 The resulting archive teems with remarkable narratives of resilience and innovation as watermen pushed hard against the notion that this was the end of something, that the decline was real.
A decade later, I moved to a position at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, an hour’s drive away, but still within the massive watershed of the Chesapeake. When I joined the “Ocean Planet” exhibition team at the National Museum of Natural History as an adviser on fishing communities, the context for concern became global. This project coincided with the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing in the formerly productive waters of the North Atlantic, a shattering event in the lives of fishermen in the maritime provinces. The moratorium came fifteen years after international fleets of highly efficient factory trawlers had been banned from the fishing grounds, but still too late to undo the damage. By the 1990s, the decline was deemed irreversible and in fact six cod populations had collapsed.5 Canadian fishermen paid the price. Amid waves of angry protests, one Newfoundlander created art. Dan Murphy, forced from fishing, began carving what the death of the fishery looked like to him: a carved codfish lying in a wooden coffin.6
While fishing and coastal communities brought me into the world of water, my curatorial work shifted toward food history in the 1990s. The lens of food provided substantially more opportunities to consider the fundamental role of water to critical issues in food studies, such as food production and sustainability; nutrition, health, and the harms of unequal access; food systems and economic policies that are at odds with environmental protection; and the impacts of climate change on global water resources. Now, as we stumble further into the twenty-first century,more people around the world are experiencing firsthand the acute impacts of water—flooding, droughts, rising sea levels, dried-up rivers and lakes, decimation (way beyond decline) of wild fish populations, noxious drinking water and dire health consequences, commercial and politically driven competition for fewer water resources. Within this context, the Gastronomica collective determined that the time was right to launch a special Call for Papers to encourage submissions on water through the lens of food. We left the CFP broad and vague, hoping to inspire a wide range of topics and perspectives.We are notdisappointed. In fact, we aim to continue highlighting water submissions in future issues and encouragemore articles, essays, creative pieces, and visual contributions on the theme, broadly conceived. The well for insightful, relevant water work is nowhere near dry.
While fishing and coastal communities brought me into the world of water, my curatorial work shifted toward food history in the 1990s. The lens of food provided substantially more opportunities to consider the fundamental role of water to critical issues in food studies, such as food production and sustainability; nutrition, health, and the harms of unequal access; food systems and economic policies that are at odds with environmental protection; and the impacts of climate change on global water resources. Now, as we stumble further into the twenty-first century,more people around the world are experiencing firsthand the acute impacts of water—flooding, droughts, rising sea levels, dried-up rivers and lakes, decimation (way beyond decline) of wild fish populations, noxious drinking water and dire health consequences, commercial and politically driven competition for fewer water resources. Within this context, the Gastronomica collective determined that the time was right to launch a special Call for Papers to encourage submissions on water through the lens of food. We left the CFP broad and vague, hoping to inspire a wide range of topics and perspectives.We are notdisappointed. In fact, we aim to continue highlighting water submissions in future issues and encouragemore articles, essays, creative pieces, and visual contributions on the theme, broadly conceived. The well for insightful, relevant water work is nowhere near dry.
Under the heading “Changes in the Water,” four articles look at the impacts of environmental change on particular places, communities, resources, and foods. Chanelle Dupuis writes about communities in the Peruvian Amazon for whom local waters have always been and remain essential to their livelihoods, sense of identity, and culture. Dupuis’ research reveals how changes in the smell of surrounding waters, detected and described by Indigenous communities, has emerged as an indicator of environmental change. She discusses the association between the increase of putrid smells with pollution and contamination of the Nanay River, as industrial and consumerist practices in the Amazon continue to degrade water quality and affect the quality of life. She argues that changes in the sensory landscape are nontrivial and indicate serious disruptions of basic health and, importantly, spiritual connections with water.
Rebecca Irons writes from South America as well, from the coast of Peru, where she explores the underlying politics of ceviche and Peru’s gastronomic revolution. As an official part of the country’s national heritage, and a candidate for UNESCO designation of intangible heritage, the tension between the gastrotourism-based approach to ceviche and the history of the dish as prepared according to local practice reveals deep fissures in Peruvian society. With historical links between raw fish and cholera, the participants in Peru’s globally recognized gastronomic ascent seek to distance their ceviche from any sense of coastal communities that are associated with disease, dirt, poverty, and nonwhite handlers. This study also looks at how the rise of microplastics in the world’s oceans presents an additional health-related concern that is still playing out among advocates for a national dish that has already turned its back on history.
Dawn Starin’s article “Pirogues to Paradise?” explores the global politics of fish and fishing, and the desperation faced by traditional fishers in The Gambia, a small country on the west coast of Africa. In an all-too familiar pattern, Gambian fishermen, who have been struggling for years, have been effectively put out of business by highly efficient international trawlers working off the coast. The ocean that supported generations of Gambian fishermen and communities is now perceived as just an escape route toward a better life elsewhere. Starin foregrounds the tales of desperate Gambians who have taken to the open ocean in their pirogues—small, open, wooden boats—heading toward Europe. Many do not survive, but others believe the risks are justified. These themes of small-scale fishermen up against a global economy built on the exploitation of ocean resources and without regard to people of color who have little political power continue to hasten the decline of species and the despair of coastal communities.
Holly Brause, whose essay rounds out the “Changes in the Water” section, is looking at water scarcity and heritage crops in New Mexico, where she is researching the future of the state’s chile industry. This iconic crop, in all its varieties and hyperlocal nuances, is essential to New Mexican cuisine, identity, and culture. While factors such as international competition, labor issues, disease, and pests have negatively affected the industry over several decades, the lack of water for irrigation is the major, and infinitely more complex, problem to solve.
Like other states in the American West, New Mexico is suffering from an extensive and devastating drought, an ongoing crisis that deepened in the summer of 2022. Without adequate winter snowpacks or natural rainfalls, water allocations from shared sources like the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers are being renegotiated and reduced, putting crops, livestock, and livelihoods at risk. Brause describes how chile farmers in New Mexico are adopting measures such as water rationing, letting land lie fallow, and investing in more efficient irrigation technologies to survive. Yet she warns that such measures can have unintended consequences; the all-important taste of different varieties of chiles can be affected by changes to the land, their terroir. The impacts of the drought on New Mexico’s chiles, cuisines, and communities are multiplying and the uncertainty of a future without water weighs heavily. While Brause writes there is no easy answer, she is certain that protecting heritage crops like chiles—including how they taste—will need “imagination, dedication, vision, and collaboration.”
The issue’s second section, “Drinking Water,” includes three articles on that most basic compound essential to maintaining life and health. The authors discuss aspects of water for drinking in New York, Tokyo, and Phoenix, and explore the extraordinary innovations, engineering, and planning behind the quest for safe, reliable, and tasty water for human consumption. James Edward Malin’s “Give Us Seltzer That We May Drink” provides a sobering look at the history of drinking water in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular focus on the horrendous conditions endured by Jewish immigrants living in the city’s tenements. Disease was rampant, and deaths from waterborne bacteria were common. Discrimination was also rampant and Jewish neighborhoods were denied the infrastructure and safeguards provided to the city’s wealthy and elite populace. The arrival of seltzer—bottled, carbonated water—stanched the flow of sickness and helped improve overall health. This story of innovation and resilience underlies the fierce loyalty Jewish New Yorkers accord seltzer and its status as a cultural icon.
The second article in this section comes to us from Tokyo and Gastronomica collective member James Farrer, who takes us on a voyage of discovery on the Kanda River, revealing how centuries of engineering have made the river a viable source of municipal drinking water. While working with a film crew, Farrer encounters the canal structures and deep tunnel built to control the river’s flow. Farrer’s former sense of the river as an unimportant eyesore to his understanding of its extraordinary history and utility reinforces the notion that the surface of water never tells the whole story of what lies below.
From Tokyo we return to the American West, specifically Phoenix, Arizona, where Christy Spackman and her co-authors Marisa Manheim and Shomit Barua present their research findings from a project they developed to engage citizens in shaping the future of municipal water in the city. As cities like Phoenix grapple with water scarcities now, and look into the future, questions such as how municipal water should taste may be left on the margins. The researchers developed a series of activities to engage diverse visitors at an exhibition about water resources and the future and share both the research design and results in their fascinating contribution.
The “First Person” section flows away from the water theme and into personal narratives that connect deeply to themes of family, labor, ethics and choices, and artistic expression. In “Don’t wait for me for lunch,” Camille Bégin traverses across generations and continents, family recipes and wartime deprivations, the end and beginning of life, all as she wades with intention and care through her family’s extensive archive. The stimulus for this archival journey is best told by Bégin herself, but it’s not giving anything away to say that she and her mother shared the goal of making “something of all the stuff” in the family archive as COVID-19 and other circumstances limited their mobility. Bégin shares what the archive holds in terms of personal recipe books kept by three generations of women living in Paris, Algeria, and, for a short time, Lebanon. The collective cuisines and memories contained in the books provide a view into her family’s lived experiences in food. The main focus of Bégin’s article, however, is her great grandfather’s letters, written while he traveled for his work as an inspector of the French lycées (secondary schools funded by the government) abroad after World War II. The letters, which serve as his travel journals, included memorable trips to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, as well as French West Africa in 1948 and 1949. He wrote of his encounters with people and places, but his comments on food raised questions that Bégin explores. This food-centric family history is a labor of love and survival; if there are more such treasures in this remarkable archive, we can only hope she will continue making “something of all the stuff.”
We often hear about the challenges of farming and labor in the United States, but seldom in the words of the farmer herself. In “How the Work Gets Done,” Margaret Ann Snow describes the small, organic vegetable farm in Alabama that she and her husband own and, how, over many years, they have contended with finding reliable and capable workers to help plant, cultivate, harvest, wash, and store various crops. Almost a decade ago, they decided to participate in the H2A visa program, which allows guest workers from other countries to live and work on American farms on a temporary basis.7
Snow’s essay describes how, over nearly a decade, she and her family have employed the same three farm workers and their close friends and relatives from Mexico. The genuine relationships that Snow and her family have built and nurtured with these individuals who are supporting their families in Mexico through their labor, contrast with reports about exploitation and abuses of temporary workers elsewhere. She reflects on how laws that have shaped farm labor lead to questions about equity, as well as what it means to be a responsible employer in American agriculture.
Rounding out this section, Amy Finley writes about living her values. In this case, considering the environmental costs of meat production and making a different choice—rabbit. Finley takes us along as she encounters vociferous opponents in the United States to the idea, practiced broadly elsewhere, that rabbits are a viable source of protein and should be more widely available and consumed. She compares the environmental cost of raising rabbits to raising beef and makes a case for Americans to become more comfortable with the environmental impacts and realities of eating meat of any kind. Finley shares the complexity of her thoughts as her convictions are put to the test.
While food stories can be found in many pages of Gastronomica, the act of storytelling frames the two contributions in the “Food and Storytelling” section of this issue. In “Mieux” by Oliver Pagani, we are taken into an imaginative tale based on one of Aesop’s fables and related folklore involving the practice of beating walnut trees to encourage growth and increased production. Within the setting of a nunnery in the Iraty beech forest of southwest France (Basque Country), an ancient walnut tree is brutalized by a group of men while Mieux, a nun who cannot bear to witness the violence, retreats to a cave where she regularly makes a highly prized type of cheese. At day’s end, she emerges to find the wounded tree as well as a visiting priest with whom she begins a conversation. Pagani engages the reader in this richly sensory narrative and then rewards us with a recipe for a dish that evokes spring in the countryside of Mieux’s tale.
Migration stories that also involve food are highly valued among food studies scholars and wider audiences alike, and “Fried Goose Eggs” by Sandra Trujillo rounds out this issue in a memorable way. Trujillo weaves together bits of tales told by the author’s T´ıas about Grandpa Manuel, nicknamed El Tacaño, The Stingy One, because of his actions as the family migrated years ago, on foot, from California to Colorado. She links that story to a more recent visit to El Tacaño, proving that the nickname still applies. Yet the visit yields two giant goose eggs that are exclaimed over and consumed with delight as more stories about food and family are exchanged. Recipe included.
In many ways this is an extraordinary issue of Gastronomica, and I congratulate the authors for their excellent and marvelously varied contributions. The reviewers— Noah Allison, Natasha Bunzl, Noha Fikry, Julia Fine, Kashyapi Ghosh, and Peter A. Kopp—deserve tremendous thanks and recognition for providing such insightful reviews of new scholarship. Finally, I wish to thank members of the collective, and especially Managing Editor Jessica Carbone, who keeps this ship of food scholars on course. And, speaking of which, please consider sharing your research and writing on food, water, environmental change, and related topics for future issues. There is no decline (decline, decline) in our interest to support work on water.
—Paula J. Johnson, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Port Republic,
Maryland, August 2022
Notes
1. Skipjacks are traditional wooden workboats used for dredging oysters under sail in the Chesapeake Bay. They are the last commercial fleet to work under sail power in the United States.
2. The term “waterman” refers to those who harvest seafood and make a living on the water in the Chesapeake Bay. The term is rarely used in other maritime regions of the United States. English exploration and settlement along the bay in what are now the states of Maryland and Virginia dates from the sixteenth century, including Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition in 1585. “Watermen” in England referred to those who handled cargo and passenger boats on rivers, canals, and other waterways. The Company of Watermen & Lightermen of the River Thames, for example, was founded in 1514. https://watermenscompany.com. The gendered term as used in the Chesapeake reflects the fact that the vast majority of the seafood harvesters and boat owner/operators in the bay are male.
3. H. L. Mencken, Happy Days (New York: Knopf, 1940), chap. 4, “The Baltimore of the
Eighties.” Kindle.
4. The research and interviews were used for the volume Working the Water: The Commercial Fisheries of Maryland’s Patuxent River, edited by Paula J. Johnson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988).
5. Ransom A. Myers, Jeffrey A. Hutchings, and Nicholas J. Barrowman, “Why Do Fish Stocks
Collapse: The Example of Cod in Atlantic Canada,” Ecological Applications, 7.1: (1997):
91–106. Also see Jenn Thornhill Verma, “30 Years after the Moratorium, What Have We Really
Learned about Cod and Science?” CBC News, July 10, 2022. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/
newfoundland-labrador/verma-fisheries-science-moratorium-history-1.6513310
6. One of Murphy’s cod coffin carvings was featured in the exhibition and catalog, Ocean Planet: Writing and Images of the Sea, edited by Peter Benchley and Judith Gradwohl (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Times Mirror Magazines, Inc., in association with the Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 166. The object was added to the permanent collections of the National Museum of American History and has been on display since 2009 in the exhibition On the Water: Stories of Maritime America. https://americanhistory.si.edu/on-the-water/fishingliving/ commercial-fishers/atlantic-cod/what-happened
7. The scope of the program is significant. In 2021, over 317,000 visas were certified for seasonal farm jobs in the United States, per the Wilson Center. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/look-h-2agrowth- and-reform-2021-and-2022