Author: Gastronomica

From Gastronomica 24.1

Editorial Letter

Not long after the publication of this issue, philosophers (yours truly among them) will acknowledge, and perhaps even celebrate, Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday on April 22, 2024. While a bit premature, this editorial letter marks the occasion by recognizing one of Kant’s contributions to the discipline of food studies beyond his well-known works on moral philosophy and the aesthetics of taste. In his later years, Kant was also an accomplished host and regularly held dinner parties—or perhaps more accurately, dinner conversations—notable for their lively discussion and modest formality: guests were expected to serve themselves and wine was readily available on the table. As Thomas de Quincey recounts, Kant’s light touch as a host mirrored his intellectual restraint—he would neither steer the conversation toward his own theories nor harbor disdain for those who disagreed with his point of view (de Quincey 2009: 7–8). For the host, the value of the evening’s details would be measured in light of the evening’s larger goal.

As one might imagine given Kant’s notoriously regimented life, his approach to every aspect of the dinner was rather methodical (which he outlines in a brief section of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). His recommendations—a philosopher’s list of hosting dos and don’ts—appear at the end of his analysis of the faculty of desire, where he addresses the tension between the human inclination to pleasure and the human inclination to virtue—or, to phrase it in a decidedly gastronomical register—whether what is good to eat can partake in and even be “the good.” For Kant, the purpose of a dinner party was not simply to feed the body or provide entertainment but for the pleasure of food and drink to encourage and support an evening of edifying conversation. Such exchanges, while not the moral good per se, nonetheless approximate the highest human good and thus constitute “a dress that properly clothes virtue” (Kant 1996: 191).

The rules for the evening’s conversation were rather straightforward: choose topics of interest to everyone and allow all to participate; keep the conversation flowing; do not change the topic of conversation unnecessarily; avoid being dogmatic; allow mutual respect and good faith to prevail. Kant notes that the guests’ enjoyment should persist even as they later reflect on the evening: “if the mind cannot find a connecting thread, it feels confused and realizes with displeasure that it has not progressed in matters of culture” (Kant 1996: 190). The evening is a success, in other terms, when reason guides the conversation and unifies the diverse contributions of the guests. The host establishes the conditions required for a good conversation, but the participants produce its coherent outcome and meaning.

Kant’s somewhat quaint vision of a dinner party—we can weigh its merits against competing models in Plato’s Symposium or Dante’s Convivium—suffers from many of his well-documented philosophical and cultural prejudices. Nonetheless, his thoughts on dinner parties are more than an interesting footnote to his renowned critical philosophy and highlight its central theme and relevance for everyday life: reason requires limits. In the face of life’s diverse and often chaotic experiences, reason provides unity, coherence, and meaning; left unchecked, however, reason can also transgress its proper bounds, become dogmatic, and lead to valid (but unverifiable) assertions of truth. Kant’s dinner party models how reason should guide but also limit our judgments, particularly when diverse (and potentially incommensurable) perspectives resist a coherent unity, or when a lack of evidence feeds (rather than constrains) reason’s ability to infer and speculate. The productive conversation that “properly clothes virtue” should, in a manner of speaking, bear the marks of its seamstress, reveal its composition, and make its dimensions available for alteration.

A host’s duties are certainly more complex and demanding today than Kant might have imagined or desired (he famously never left the city of Ko¨nigsberg and only ever entertained small groups of educated men). Nonetheless, Kant’s dinner party remains relevant. His critical approach suggests that the tension between pleasure and virtue, along with the dinner party that provides the model for its resolution, require a reinterpretation sensitive to the changing material and social realities that confront the host. In the broadest sense, our shared coexistence on a shrinking planet requires a host willing to pose the most fundamental questions: What should we eat? Who should sit at the table? At what cost (physical, social, moral) should we partake in this pleasure? More importantly, the host should recognize that the topics used to frame the discourse are themselves constructs of our embodied and inherited reasoning— concepts shaped by experience while simultaneously providing access to it. The essays gathered and arranged in this issue reflect my attempt to frame the conversation around three such concepts.

Authenti-cities
A city’s identity seems to be always underway—an ongoing interpretation of the social and material forces that constitute its authentic character. However, this character exists primarily through its representations: the values expressed by its residents and their way of life, but perhaps even more so in the value that others seek to extract from it as producers and consumers. Natasha Bernstein Bunzl begins our conversation with an ethnographic study of Shuk, an Israeli restaurant in the heart of London. Bunzl explores how the restaurant produces representations of “modern Jerusalem cuisine”: dishes and practices that construct, but also silence, narratives about the social and political realities of the region. Despite the apolitical intentions of the restaurant’s creators and employees, their performance of a contested cuisine reveals its complex political and social reality. Such performances are not, however, confined to a curated restaurant space. Pooja Kalita examines changing notions of authenticity in the preparation and sale of one of Assam’s emblematic foods: pithas. Kalita’s fieldwork ranges across various modes of pitha production and performance—from vendors on the streets of Guwahati to highly commercialized and industrialized operations serving the broader region. Across this spectrum of contexts, it is bishakh—trust—that not only assures a quality product for consumers but re-interprets gender roles within the broader imaginary of authentic pitha production. Anna Greenspan’s photo essay chronicles Shanghai’s unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her account of the days before and during lockdown, notions of (its) authentic city life suffer the unique challenges that urban spaces create during a pandemic—ones amplified and distorted through the particularities of Shanghai’s geopolitical situation but never exempt from the more persistent reality that for and within cities “joy is always imperiled.”

Sustain-abilities
Perhaps pleasure should be included among the planet’s precarious resources when the conversation turns to sustainability. Sophie Wennerscheid proposes a novel interpretation and application of one of food literature’s most iconic dinner parties— Karen Blixen’s “Babette’s Feast.” Wennerscheid’s analysis rethinks culinary pleasure from the perspective of sustainability rather than extravagance or abundance—not to condemn it as the Puritan context of the story might suggest, but to find new forms of enjoyment within a more coherent and harmonious approach to the culinary arts. Her study concludes with a workshop designed to explore this narrative and multisensorial vision for sustainability, an approach that stands in stark contrast to a sustainable future achieved through advances in technology. Hallam Stevens, however, considers the more scientific approach to sustainability and reflects on ethical and existential repercussions of a “monstrous” meatball cultured from the genetic material of an extinct wooly mammoth. This technological resurrection unearths something coeval with our own origins as a species—namely, the question of whether achieving a sustainable good requires a transformation of technology or simply of behavior. Such transformations are not so distinct, however, when new products leverage their material and perceptual authenticity. This is the context for Brian Silverstein’s essay on “The Re-Making of Turkish Olive Oil.” More than simply an exploration of Turkey’s entrance into the crowded market for high-quality olive oil, the author traces how shifts in ownership, marketing, and sensory perception enact a “quality turn” in Turkish olive oil production that aims for economic and environmental sustainability.

Commemo-rations
As the conversation nears its end, sweeter fare encourages reflection and the construction of lasting memories. In “Sacred Leftovers: Hosting and Eating after the Ancestors,” Indira Arumugam illustrates how food offerings for departed loved ones bind the sacred and the profane through narratives, images, and acts of care— thoughtfully prepared dishes that renew the bonds of family and culture by invoking origins and sustaining memories. For Jason A. Reuscher, discovering the origins of swarn’s tangled history becomes an exercise in lost cultural and etymological knowledge. Personal memories converse with the broader narrative of the German culinary diaspora to reconstruct the dish’s history and provide renewed access to a lost past. Sandra Trujillo’s bittersweet reflection memorializes her father through “Mr. De la Rosa’s Agua de Jamaica.” As with all recipes, this one commemorates the past by reproducing its material inspiration and sustaining those committed to its future.

These essays encourage and model a conversation that achieves a certain degree of coherence while remaining transparent about the operations and effects of their critical practice. The guiding threads of authenticity, sustainability, and memory do not lead us back to a lost origin or an elusive essence but instead reveal their purposeful interweaving as conceptual tools for analysis and reflection. Each author’s gesture—respectful and yet critical of these issues’ complexities—contributes to a coherent and meaningful conversation about how and why eating should be more than sustenance, often pleasure, and ideally something good.

—Robert T. Valgenti, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Lebanon, PA,
December 2023

References
de Quincey, Thomas. 2009. “Thomas de Quincey: ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,’ 1827.” Le
Télémaque 36.2: 7-8.

Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. by V. L. Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

From Gastronomica 23.4

Editorial Letter

I will confess to having a sweet tooth. Another confession: I have no idea as to the origin of this phrase. Is it original to the English language? Or is it a translation, given the universal human preference for sweet tastes, a desire so established that babies around the world will smile when fed a sweet item? (Whereas there is no such consistent delight when it comes to salty or bitter or sour or umami.) More questions arise: Why not a sweet mouth? Or a sweet palate? Although the impulse to investigate further, for me, is equal to the temptation of a slice of moist carrot cake with a lovely light cream cheese frosting, I will henceforth ignore it. There will be no recourse to a reference book (say the excellent Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by the inestimable Darra Goldstein) or to the insanely wild web of dubious information. I will rely, instead, on what I have learned from reading the articles and essays in this issue of Gastronomica , the last issue for 2023.

For in this issue, we are fortunate enough to have a set of articles exploring the meaning of sugar and sweets, the practices of making sweet food and drink, and the consequences of these practices in Japan. Organized and compiled by Eric C. Rath, a member of the Gastronomica editorial collective, there is so much here to savor. There is a “chronology to sugar” in Japan. An especially complex and rich aspect of these historical explorations is that the material, symbolic and social dimensions of sugar and sweets are investigated. As Rath and Takeshi Watanabe point out in their introduction to this section, “Understanding the meanings of sweetness in Japan begins with the products that produce that taste.” We are thus invited to understand the need for not just sugar but also koji (a naturally occurring mold known as Aspergillus oryzae) in making sake (a fermented beverage); the role of Taiwan in the sourcing of sugar cane for Japan; the meaning of foods in poetry; and the power of kashi and mochi (certain categories of sweets) for the nobility during the Heian period.

This issue, though, does not begin and end solely with sweetness. We have other essays, ones that intersect with the articles on Japan and thereby create other layers of insight, provocation, and enjoyment for you, dear reader. One layer that emerges is a shared interest in understanding acts of discernment—what makes a food or drink distinctive and how best to describe such distinctiveness. Charlie Leary’s interview with Julien Camus and his commentary on Camus’s geosensorial approach to wine describe accessible, inclusive ways to appreciate wine’s distinctive flavors. In Eric Rath’s article we learn about the environmental and cultural origins of the complex flavors and aromas in sweet versus dry sake through the translated guide (originally published in 1688), The Idiot’s Guide to Sake Brewing (Dōmō shuzōki). Watanabe, in an exploration of Japanese poetry of the Heian period (794–1185 CE), argues that food was not solely gustatory but articulates a broader understanding of aesthetics and discernment.

Another interesting layer of the issue concerns feelings of ambivalence—toward foods, toward a person in relation to a food, and then, of course, toward change. In Michael Hammer’s interpretation of a well-known Spanish poem, the poet’s uncertain response to being served a dish by his love speaks as much to the broader fears of sixteenth-century Spain as to a tension between the desires of food and of sex. In Elora Halim Chowdhury’s food memoir, the nostalgia for the foodways of her childhood intersects with her understanding that so many others were responsible for her well-being—the Bangladesh of her childhood has vanished in more ways than one.

Next, a deep and resonant interconnected layer concerns the profoundly social nature of food and drink. Evidence certainly suggests that the human enjoyment of sweetness is innate and individual, but equally as much evidence indicates that all our experiences of all food and drink are endlessly structured and social. The social states explored include Lillian Tsay’s discussion of the legacy of Japanese colonialism as seen through the expanding availability of sugar from Taiwan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the use of sweets (notably kashi and moshi) to demonstrate power among Japanese nobility during the Heian Period, as explained by Emily Warren. In her short experimental essay, Catherine L. Mah questions the social pressures involved in research on access to food: how are food scholars themselves shaped by their social conditions? Finally, Melissa Fuster and Crystal D´ıaz recount the celebratory meal commemorating the life of Cruz Miguel Ort´ız Cuadra, a pioneering Puerto Rican food historian beloved for his generosity of spirit and intellect.

This issue of Gastronomica confirms “life’s rich pageant” (another phrase I will not investigate)—we eat the carrot cake or the mochi, brew the sake or sip the wine, and embrace fully that there is so much else to savor.

—Amy B. Trubek, on behalf of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Vermont, September 2023

From Gastronomica 23.3

Food in Place

I love making lists. Recently, I sat down and made a list of all the times I’ve moved to a new place (an occupational hazard for precarious academics). I counted nineteen. Some of those moves required just shifting my possessions to a different habitat within a city; others involved changing continents, social insurance, health care, pension plan, and life stage. Some were for longer, some for shorter, and some for very short stays (in my mid-thirties, I moved seven times in as many years). During those periods of vagabondism, I learned to appreciate food as a means of connecting to new places and a constant that could outlast relocating.

The pieces in this issue explore food’s various relationships to place. Place is central to the academic study of food as well as to lived personal, professional, and political engagements with food. Global food chains, local food movements, national cuisines, migrant marketplaces, urban environments, fields, vineyards, restaurants, kitchens, and waste disposal facilities have all bounded historical, anthropological, geographic, and sociological inquiries of food, while at the same time forming focal points of food activism and debate in the present.

The essays in the first section tell stories of lost places: of death, decay, and departure, captured by experiences of butchering, cooking, and tasting. In Kelly Donati’s piece “Lessons from a Kangaroo,” notions of country and Country collide. The fenced territories of Australian colonial production, grounded in imperial notions of erasure and extractivism, overlay the sentient landscapes of First Nations people. The relationship between Country and country determines ecologies of edibility and extermination: who gets to be food and who gets to be eater, who counts as a pest and who as a rightful inhabitant of shared spaces, worthy of consideration in the stewardship of place. Witnessing the death of a kangaroo prompts Donati to reflect on the limits of existing notions of sustainability, and to call for a “multispecies gastronomy” that recognizes nonhuman animals as not just food but as “ancestors, kin, totems, and gastronomic subjects in their own right.” Daniel E. Bender’s captivating history and ethnography of the Alto Piemonte peels back the layers of industrial decay, natural disaster, and social transformation that have shaped the region’s rare wines. “Wine is good for thinking ruins,” he reminds us. Stages of ruination, accumulating in the region’s vines, flavor the wine of the present. To focus on wreckage rather than heritage means drawing attention to capitalism’s ability to produce ruins rather than returns. In piercing prose and haunting metaphors, this piece asks us to rethink familiar notions of terroir and taste. The section concludes with Nancy Sommers’ attempts at relocating her mother, disappeared through the cruel unraveling of dementia, in the physical remains of her family home. Rummaging through her mother’s cupboards, drawers, keepsakes, and recipes, Sommers encounters a careful curator of the past, a chronicler who “built a life around forgetting” and faded behind the remnants of her life. It is a story of food as a failed mnemonic device: no amount of apple kuchen can restore her mother’s lost memories or recover the tacit knowledge forever trapped within the pages of her mother’s recipes. But if dementia remains “a country without an exit,” it is also, in Sommers’ search, a site of recovery: a reunion with a new mother, freed from the entrapments of the past.

The seesaw of past and present also runs through Sean Wyer’s “Gourmet and the Ghetto: The ‘Foodification’ of Rome’s Historic Jewish Quarter,” which rings in the issue’s next section on food’s interplay with locality. Wyer asks how food businesses became central to Rome’s former Ghetto, and resists generalizing explanations framed around shortcuts such as touristification or gentrification. Instead, the “foodification” of Rome’s former Ghetto was a hyperlocal process, according to Wyer, and nothing about it was straightforward. The unity of place, culture, religion, ingredients, and ways of cooking, which a locale like the former Ghetto implies, is a myth: the most prominent former Ghetto restaurants are neither Jewish nor kosher, the boundary between Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine is fluid, and even the physical spaces of the former Ghetto have changed significantly. Instead, Wyer credits a complex interplay among heritage tourism, a general expansion of kosher food across Rome, shifts within Judaism, and the simultaneous rise of gastronativism, cosmopolitanism, and hyperlocal cuisine for the former Ghetto’s foodification. Rather than a mere monument to local food heritage, however, Wyer suggests the former Ghetto is a site of culinary innovation and adaptation.

Place and time also interplay in Chelsea Fisher and Clara Albacete’s article “Ancient Greenwashing: On Food Justice and Civilizations in the Supermarket.” The authors belong to a growing group of scholars who contend that the logics of production in a particular place—the plantation—at a particular time—during colonialism— had such a profound impact on our contemporary system of food production and consumption and the environmental justice conflicts it engendered that it ought to be recognized as its own “cene”—the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene is one of the historical contexts within which Fisher and Albacete situate the marketing tool of “ancient greenwashing,” a promotional appeal to imagined pasts that obscures the legacies of colonial extractivism. The paper also connects ancient greenwashing to development initiatives in global health that seek to promote sustainability.

How chefs use notions of sustainability to craft their own identity and position themselves against new pressures within the restaurant industry is the topic of Jed Hilton’s ethnography of elite chefs in Britain, which concludes this section. Hilton discovers a range of interpretations of sustainability—from locally sourced and seasonal food to good quality ingredients and certifications. Sustainability is far from a straightforward commitment for many chefs. It can conflict with other ethical principles, such as multiculturalism or affordable fare. Claims to sustainability are underregulated, while credentialing systems, such as the Michelin Green Star, lack a clear protocol and are inadequately enforced. And while notions of place have rightly played an important role in definitions of sustainability, this has come at the expense of other considerations, such as the labor conditions under which local ingredients are produced. As a result, many chefs increasingly distrust claims of sustainability. Perhaps, Hilton concludes, the concept of sustainability might even be structurally incompatible with the fine dining industry, with its inherent wastefulness and pursuit of perfection.

The third section considers concrete spaces—the kitchen, the dining table, the banquet hall—and the gendered, classed, and temporal divisions such spaces sustain. Gendered divisions of labor and spatial hierarchies mark the elite warrior households in medieval Japan, which Eric C. Rath describes in his analysis of a Japanese picture scroll showing a rat warlord’s wedding banquet. A subtle commentary on elite Japanese society (the rat bride is revealed to be human), the scroll also provides clues of the goings-on in a medieval kitchen. The separation of tasks and spaces occurred along strictly gendered lines: named male servants cooked while unnamed female servants processed and served ingredients; carving and flavoring were the province of men; female servants were relegated to outside spaces while male servants operated inside. In the rat world, as in that of humans, divisions of power and status organized elite food preparation and extended the power and status of mighty military leaders.

We conclude the issue with two pieces by Jo Podvin. “Not Just Any Drupe” is an exercise in lyrical replacement: fruity antihimerias meet literary paradoxes, creating a pandemonium of sensations and unmet associations. Peaches are plummy, nectarines peachy, and the roundy plums are cherry. Human body parts “cradle” and are “stuffed with” produce, while human mouths, chins, and fingers bear the traces of indulgent fruit consumption. Place is elusive in the poem: the lines evoke an impossible larder or a surrealist market in a single vertiginous verse. Podvin’s “Being Butter,” finally, is an ode to “the resident cubes” tucked away in the butter compartment in the refrigerator door of a family kitchen. Butter “came out of Africa (like the rest of us),” but Podvin traces the “unbridled unctuous delight” across countries, time, religions, and species. Part memoir, part encyclopedia, part stream of consciousness, this collection of aphorisms, anecdotes, diary entries, and dairy appreciation is reminiscent of an ancient commonplace book, a collection of quotes, ideas, and information interspersed with the compiler’s own reflections—not unlike an editorial letter.

As I prepare for what will hopefully be my last move, I take solace in the commonplace book of my own culinary life, a stockpile of sensorial recollections I have carefully cultivated over time and across places. In the past, this repertoire has simultaneously soothed and aggravated a loss of place. Against sunk costs and lost tastes stands the continuity of the familiar, facilitated by a growing repertoire of welcome ingredients and the flattening impact of global consumerism. Life in different places confuses and diversifies the palate and makes it both easier and more impossible to live anywhere.

Still, I can’t wait to make a list of all the food places I will explore in my new home.

—Lisa Haushofer, on behalf of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Amsterdam, July 2023