Tag: featured

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

From Gastronomica 23.2

Working with Food

On its cover, this issue features an image of freshly baked loaves leaning in the windowsill of a small bakery. The viewer is met by the distant gaze of a woman from behind the pane of glass. Two bright signs threaten to overwhelm the loaves: “BREAD 5¢ A LOAF.” The picture was shot eighty-six years ago by photographer Berenice Abbott and is part of her broader portfolio on modernizing New York (more on that below). “Bread Store. 259 Bleecker” captures a provisioning shop just a couple of months before the American economy fell into deep turmoil during the 1937–1938 recession. Taken on its own, the photo resonates with our current moment when the cost of food is top of mind. The context is, of course, different; global supply chains are emerging from the pandemic shock of the past three years, their efficiency further hobbled by geopolitical conflict and weather-induced crop failures (Stanford 2023). In Canada, where I am, the news cycle covering inflationary pressures on household spending and soaring food prices has in the past few months focused its attention on the outsized profits of large grocery chains. A government probe of food price inflation led grocery executives to Canada’s House of Commons, to testify before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food amidst calls for more transparency in food provisioning systems (Charlebois and Music 2023; Stanford 2023). In many casual conversations over the past couple of months I found myself being asked—when people learned that I work in food studies—some variation of the question: “Is it true? Are we being squeezed by the supermarkets?” It’s not a question I could easily answer, but I welcomed the growing curiosity about producers, workers, retailers, global supply chains, shorter supply chains, and alternative forms of food distribution.

This issue of Gastronomica broadly considers the politics of provisioning, and the varied forms of labor that sustain individuals and communities. The first section, Urban Transformations, opens with a photo essay of fourteen historical black-andwhite images documenting the creep of modernity in 1930s New York. In featuring the work of the late Berenice Abbott, historian Rick Halpern draws attention to the visibility of labor throughout the city’s culinary infrastructure, from street markets to small family-run retail shops. The photo essay closes with a poignant comment about bodies and space in the modernizing city: the laborious rhythms of the Fulton fish market on the edge of lower Manhattan are juxtaposed with the invisible labor of a midtown automat that proffers a selection of pies. Stuart Freedman’s sensory ethnography of London’s eel, pie, and mash shops extends the exploration of modernity, labor, and the changing spaces of the city. Describing the shops as “a historical reverberation of a cheap re-fuelling stop for London’s cockney working class,” Freedman puts their rise and their subsequent marginalization in dialogue with contemporary practices of nostalgic remembrance that unfold in the postindustrial city.

The next two pieces spotlight how particular foods change amidst urban transitions. Thiago Braga tracks the recent rise and popularization of tea art in China. Highlighting the connection between the individual body and the body politic through affect, Braga shows how tea art is both an aesthetic practice and an ethical practice that promises to reconfigure the individual’s relationship to self, other, and nature in a period of rapid economic and urban development. “Tasting the ‘Future of Food’ on a Bay-Area Cellular Agriculture Tour” transports readers to San Francisco to learn about alternative protein technologies. In an opening note, readers encounter a research and development lab housed within an old industrial building in a gentrifying part of the city, where resonances of the district’s working-class roots mingle with increasing concentrations of capital and technological expertise. In a conversation oriented toward sustainable and socially just food futures, this multidisciplinary team of food scholars reflects on their tour of an emerging cellular agriculture ecosystem. They meet with scientists and industry experts, experience the flavors and textures of cell-cultured salmon, and share multiple perspectives on the social and environmental implications of this new food technology.

Cristina Fernández Recasens offers a different view of fish, taking readers to home kitchens in coastal Catalonia to open the next section, on Work and Play. Here, their research on fish consumption and reproductive labor in Catalonia leads them to an important recipe that in fact does not include any fish at all. The recipe is for truita de pedres—pebbles omelet—shared with them by a woman named Montserrat who collects and archives recipes from women in the region in a bid to preserve their culinary knowledge and showcase local foods. The first time Montserrat made this particular omelet she sourced stones from a nearby beach, later recalling her son’s surprise when she served it to him for dinner one day. Truita de pedres, Fernández Recasens writes, renders visible the largely invisible reproductive labor—unpaid cooking and care work—that supports the formal economy. For Fernández Recasens, the dish finds its reflection in the local fishing industry, where women support the supply chain in largely unwaged roles, selling fish at market and cooking fish at home but rarely engaging in the activity of professional fishing. Truita de pedres, Montserrat’s play on the story of stone soup and the collective sharing of resources, is a recipe of resistance.

The intertwining of gendered power relations, provisioning practices, and eating behaviors carries over as a thematic echo in the next article. Annie Koempel, an applied anthropologist and registered dietician, documents her research on the sociality of eating behaviors and the ripple effects of disordered eating. By situating disordered eating within the context of community, Koempel shifts the frame of analysis from the individual to the collective, showing how disordered eating moves across bodies and relationships amongst family, friends, and colleagues. For some of the study’s participants in rural Appalachia, the work of feeding the family might include the pleasurable activities of gardening, cooking, and baking, but it also consists in the adaptations required to accommodate the diets and diagnoses of others in the home. Such adaptations are material, as well as social and emotional, throwing into relief the gendered, classed, and affective nature of eating behaviors.

Two pieces on culinary innovation in the home kitchen round out this section on Work and Play, providing a foil to common narratives of domestic drudgery. In “Cooking Up a Distinctly Singaporean Tamil Cuisine,” Indira Arumugam explores the intimacies of homecooked food through the stories of her family’s migration, highlighting the creative contributions of diasporic women. Citing the resourcefulness and the recipes of her grandmother—who had moved from rural Tamil Nadu to Singapore where she raised and fed her family of eight—Arumugam traces threads of remembrance and experimentation through newfound culinary techniques, tastes, and textures. She recalls her grandmother’s many hybrid creations—such as coconut milk raita, biryani crafted with lemongrass and pandan leaves, and curried squid and prawn dishes—and reflects on her grandmother’s playful incorporation of Malay condiments into traditional Tamil dishes. Such adaptations were made not just as a way of survival in a new home, Arumugam writes, but also as an act of flourishing. With a focus on ornamental cookery, Julia Segal also takes up the question of labor and playfulness in the home kitchen. “Breaking the Mold: How Jell-O Helped Women Get Creative in the Kitchen” asks, who has license to get creative with food? The piece combines written narrative with a curated photographic project to explore gendered food work in dialogue with jelly cakes, capturing a nostalgic resurgence of Jell-O in contemporary popular culture in tandem with an emergent artistic phenomenon that is mediated by digital platforms. These stories of provisioning extend from the home kitchen into the public sphere, making forms of care work visible by exploring the subversive possibilities of play.

Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt-Holloway’s interview spotlight on a Black-led food cooperative opens this issue’s final section, Market Values. The Raleigh-based Fertile Ground Food Cooperative got its start more than a decade ago following the closure of a local supermarket; the cooperative took its initial form as a farmers’ market, featuring Black vendors and growers and, crucially, providing fresh, healthy, affordable, and delicious foods in a neighborhood that has lacked access due to systemic marginalization. Dillahunt-Holloway speaks with Erin Dale, a founding member of Fertile Ground, about the ways in which social justice and economic justice are guiding the cooperative’s plans for a community-owned grocery store and its vision for building a new food economy.

The final two articles take readers into open-air markets, each probing sets of meanings, values, and politics striking to the heart of market operations. Focusing on a case study in the American Midwest, “Nostalgia and the Protection of White Supremacy at a Public Farmers’ Market” examines how a particular public discourse took shape in the face of controversy surrounding a vendor’s place at the market and ensuing protests by antiracist activists. The authors argue that “nostalgia for a community market free of conflict and complexity,” built on the flawed foundation of an agrarian imaginary, motivated a public discourse that ultimately excluded antiracist protestors and social justice activists from a common vision of the market’s community. Ellen Meiser’s photo essay on Taiwan’s caishichang offers a different view of market politics. Meiser tells the story of how vendors at the ubiquitous daytime markets grew into political pillars for the community, a marked shift in status away from the social margins compared to decades prior. Amongst the local population, these decentralized street markets are broadly valued for their contributions to the economy, their provisioning of affordable, fresh, and locally produced foods, and their amplification of campaigns and grassroots networks in the democratic political system.

Readers will find that the following pages are rich not only in research and stories but also in art and curation. The images, when taken together, render visible some of the many ways in which people feed communities. Some of the photos are archival, while some document fleeting and quotidian moments in contemporary food systems; others, still, are creative projects that put subversion at their center. In closing, then, I will echo Cristina Fernández Recasens’s call to dream up and craft one’s own version of a pebbles omelet.

—Jaclyn Rohel, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Toronto, March 2023

References
Charlebois, Sylvain and Janet Music. 2023. “Grocer Distrust: New Survey Suggests Majority of Canadians Distrust Grocers But Do Blame Other Factors For Higher Food Prices.” Agri- Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University. Last modified April 4, 2023. https://www.dal.ca/ sites/agri-food/research/grocer-distrust.html.

Stanford, Jim. 2023. “Statistics Canada Aggregate Data on Food Retail and Food Processing Profits.” Submission to House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri- Food, Study of Food Price Inflation. Centre for Future Work. Last modified February 2023. https://centreforfuturework.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Stanford-for-Agriculure- Committee-on-Food-Prices-and-Profits.pdf.

From Gastronomica 23.1

An Academic Diptych

This year represents a peculiar personal anniversary. I have now been doing food studies for as long as I previously did sexuality studies, before my “culinary turn.” While I have gradually slid from the sex to the food side of the academic table, I still teach both subjects. I also remain active on the editorial board of Sexualities, a leading journal in the sociology of sexuality, even as I participate in the editorial collective for Gastronomica. Thus, as I was gazing at Jess Stephens’s mesmerizing photographic diptychs in this issue, I also was contemplating the academic diptych of my own career, on the one side “sex,” on the other “food”—what connects them? This question formed for me a way of looking at this issue. Just like the flies caught lighting upon the dates in the cover image from Stephens, questions of bodily politics buzz from food to sex studies. Drawing on these articles as food for thought, I found three terms that seemed ripe for comparative reflection: authenticities, temporalties, and borders.

Sex and food find a connection in the concept of authenticity. Food and sex both are visceral ways of grounding culturally prescribed “truths” about self and society in the body. As Gaozi tells Mencius, “food and sex are natural” (食色性也 shi se xing ye), but for Mencius, this commonsensical observation is only half the story. The Confucian conception of nature, like Aristotle’s, is both descriptive and normative (Bloom 1997; Hall 2020). In short, desires for sex and food are simultaneously formed in the body and informed through the cultivation of a moral instinct. Similarly, for us moderns, “authenticity” is a term that contains within it this simultaneously socialized and naturalized conception of a prescriptive path—a “way” (dao 道) of eating—that still must be cultivated through social pedagogy (e.g., food writing and nutrition studies). Sex is analogously thought to be “natural,” though the standards of “nature” we apply to it are different.

As both culture and nature, food and sex also are ways of marking social time on multiple scales, from the daily meals and hugs to feasts celebrating a lifelong marriage. Food, through the vehicle of palatal memory, is a particularly powerful way of establishing shared social temporalities, confirming private and public connections through palatal nostalgia. Sex, in contrast, is often a way of forgetting as much as remembering, and sexual memories are notoriously mutable. Both can be ways of grounding stories about our pasts, presents, and futures. But are these stories told through the body always reliable?

Finally, eating and sex can both be a way of staking out boundaries against others, while simultaneously creating especially inviting ways of violating them. While sexual border crossing is more often perilous, gastronomy both celebrates distinctive social identities and suggests new recipes for redefining them. Culinary boundaries and borderlands are concepts in many of the pieces in this issue. Therefore, in outlining themes that unite this issue of Gastronomica, I try to generate some formative questions from my perspective on sexuality studies, which I pose as one way of reading these contributions to food studies. I start first with the theme of authenticity, then memories and temporalities, and finally return to the questions of boundaries and boundary crossing.

Authenticities: An Italian Dao of Eating

The topic of authenticity is at the center of this issue of Gastronomica, with a pathbreaking special section devoted to the concept of authenticity in food studies, all based on Italian case studies. Since this special section comes with its own thorough introduction by Lauren Crossland-Marr and Elizabeth L. Krause, I will not introduce the individual articles here. However, as a bifocaled food-and-sex scholar, I can’t help but be struck by the question of whether or how sexuality scholars would talk about “authentic sex,” and what form this conversation might take. My own reply would be to point to the discourse of “naturalness” in ethnographic sex research. Good sex is often described as “natural” in interview-based studies (Fahs and Plante 2017; Farrer, Tsuchiya, and Bagrowicz 2008). This idea of “naturalness” is conceptually very close to “authenticity” in implying a corporal telos, grounded in “natural” needs that we still must discover and cultivate socially. Another explicit take on authenticity comes up in studies of commercial sex, in which clients seek “real” emotional connections with sex workers, even while knowing such connections are contrived or even faked (Bernstein 2007). Authenticity in sex is thus opposite of contrivance and commodification—but exists in their shadow. In authenticity discourses about food, this grounding of palatal taste in nature is tied to embodiment but also more broadly to peoples and lands—in the worst instances, a crude culinary version of Blut und Boden (blood and soil), in others as flexible ties among peoples, places, and practices. As with sex, there is a similarly naïve hope that such “real” connections can survive the processes of commodification, marketing, and regulation. The articles in this section explore how tastes are bound to people and places, while not ignoring the social exclusion created in market mechanisms and regulatory standards, many of which are institutionalized by European Union authorities.

Not surprisingly, as we also see in the articles in this issue, norms of culinary authenticity are viewed with suspicion by many ordinary eaters. Is it because they seem to be imposed by bureaucrats and elitist foodie authorities? Some examples in this special section seem to point in this direction. How would people react if standards for “authentic sex” were regulated by the European Union or the columnists of The New Yorker? Indeed, research in sexuality shows that in addition to “naturalness,” another standard for good sex is the ability to choose our own sexual scripts (Fahs and Plante 2017). Probably, the same is true for food. “Good eating”—like good sex—most likely entails our choosing our own scripts for authenticity. In this issue, we learn about several scripts for authenticity, mostly from Italy. This is a pluralistic and ethnographic approach to authenticity that brings much pleasure in reading, even for those who remain skeptical of the promise of “true” food.

Temporalities: Culinary Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future

Linked perhaps to the peculiar physiology of smell and taste, gustatory experiences are recalled so vividly (or at least imagined so) that they enable us to re-encounter a personal and collective past as though it is still present—the famous “Proust effect” (Hamilton 2011). Individual and shared food histories are constructed through this acutely felt culinary nostalgia (Swislocki 2008). Sex, however, in contrast to taste, reminds us of the untrustworthy nature of sensory memories. Men and women show wide discrepancies in their recollections of sexual experiences, even basics such as the numbers of sexual partners (Brown and Sinclair 1999). Sexual memory points to the equally human arts of forgetting and dissembling, something food scholars might consider more thoroughly. Indeed, the essays in this issue point to both slippages and creativity in imagining food pasts, presents, and futures. Memories are extremely fecund, but they may be faulty. And even imagined futures are deeply laden with selective readings of the recent past.

Several of the essays in this issue of Gastronomica deal with temporalities expressed through food memories, food nostalgia, and routinized food practices. First, we learn how personal food memories help us construct the present while simultaneously reimagining a collective past. Victor Valle, in his article in this issue, takes his own kernel of childhood palatal memories and enlarges it into an ambitious exploration of the culinary meanings of chiles that draws on poetics as well as neuroscience. Far more than an exercise in childhood nostalgia, Valle’s essay presents the hope of a postcolonial politics of food memories based on both personal and collective memories associated with the pungent chiles native to the Southwest United States.

One of the most intriguing explorations of culinary storytelling in this issue involves a case of failed or disappointed food memory. The author and photographer (and our reviews editor) Janita Van Dyk returns to Italy aiming to photograph the foods and places she had associated with the slow food movement only to find that her memories have failed her. On her return, the foods she previously photographed are now ugly and the places disappointing. There is no Proustian madeleine moment of recognition for her. For Van Dyk, food memory proves faulty and evasive. She can only recapture the essential conviviality of slow food by refocusing her gaze on candid portraits of her fellow diners and friends. In this essay, then, the reputed reliability of gustatory memory is questioned, and the presence of slow food is shown to be less on the plate and the tongue than in the momentary expressions of co-presence on the faces of the people she shares it with.

Food pasts also become ways to talk about the future of food. We see this vividly in Alex Ketchum’s essay on the retrofuturist visions of food robots and food computers in mid-twentieth-century America. As Ketchum points out, even in a future in which culinary work is made effortless by automation, men could only imagine women staying at home in order to push all the digitized buttons. Evidently, the unquestioned routines of women conjuring meals for men makes a gastronomic future dominated by robots and computers palatable to the assumed male reader or viewer of these ads. In short, the future imagined through food may just be another jaded version of the gendered past, until someone unexpectedly stops pushing buttons for those in power.

Taken together, these articles show that food is a particularly pliable medium for imagining our pasts, presents, and futures, but it is not as reliable as we sometimes think. Ultimately food memory is, as Van Dyk writes, a political act, as is the imagination of our food futures. And, good meals, like good sex, may be as much an art of forgetting as remembering.

Borderlands: Border Crossings and Imagined Frontiers

Another shared symbolic function of sex and food is the politics of boundary-making and boundary-crossing. Sexual boundary crossings are often fraught with danger, whether concerning the boundaries of heteronormativity, homogamy, or propriety. Eating seems far more promiscuous. While religious folks may refuse the food of the “other” and urban elites grouse about culinary appropriation, gastronomic practice has long been an orgy of cross-fertilization, allowing for a bodily politics of contamination and hybridization. With sex, in contrast, people proceed cautiously across sacred social boundaries, often at mortal peril. The comparison is not meant to imply equivalence, but I do believe thinking about these similar but different uses of food and sex helps sharpen our attention on what is at stake in the corporal politics surrounding both.

Foodways can both solidify and blur social boundaries. In this issue of Gastronomica, the primary emphasis is on the ways in which foods allow us to cross borders, to inhabit and reimagine borderlands, and to use border crossings to reimagine the identity of the center. Blake Allmendinger’s paper reads the border-crossing career of Julia Child against another essay by Bernand DeVoto that defends a romanticized idea of the “frontier” in American history. For Allmendinger, the significance of Child’s writing lies in the politics of opening up the American domestic sphere to experiments with cosmopolitan foodways at a time when the Cold War politics of the country were increasingly xenophobic. According to Allmendinger, Child defined the kitchen as “a liminal space of transformation and possibility; as a contact zone in which different cultures converged.” Of course, America had long placed French cooking at the center of its metropolitan culinary tables, so Child’s work might not be quite as radical as Allmendinger applies. Still, Child clearly did impact the American kitchen in ways that went further and deeper than the fancy French banquets served to elites in large cities since the nineteenth century (Freedman 2016). Readers of Child’s cookbooks and those inspired by her learned first that there were acceptable ways for Americans to be “European” and then later to be “global.”

Culinary histories of borderlands may also help rewrite the broader social histories of places, show connections that were later erased, and even expand the “border” to include most of the territory. Taking us on a far-ranging culinary tour of the border zones of the United States and Mexico, Patrick Charbonneau and Jeffrey M. Pilcher use the sweet fudge-like panochita de leche to show us how food histories can be reimagined through a particularly popular food item. Panochita is a confection of boiled sugar and milk invented in colonial Mexico. It became a popular sweet in nineteenth-century Mexican cities and towns. The authors trace its cross-border lineage and show it sometimes merged with similar categories of sweets, especially fudge, in the United States. It was subsequently used by cookbook authors to represent both Mexicanness in Mexico and localized authenticity in the American West before gradually becoming a nostalgic and rare item sold in only a few places. Studying this sweet allows the authors to reexamine a postcolonial Mexican American history of shared culinary borderlands and cross-border influences. As a coda to this historical article, Charbonneau and Pilcher join with Kelsey Kilgore in the Culinaria kitchen at the University of Toronto to recreate panochita in a series of surprisingly arduous experiments, showing how the embodiment of a dish involves more than a sense of taste, but also muscular kitchen labor.

Sex rarely pops up explicitly in Gastronomica, but it did here. In passing, the authors note what Spanish speakers will already know, that more than a century ago the term “panochita” turned into a slang term for female genitals, and remains so today. The longevity of this slang perhaps points to the resonance of food–sex metaphors. A cautionary tale about googling for images of “panochita” also points to the moral boundary work we reflexively engage in about sex. There are no “not safe for work” warnings on food porn. True, food also can be the locus of fierce moral boundary maintenance. Hindu extremists have killed Indian Muslims for allegedly slaughtering cows. Secular examples also can be found. Some Americans protest the eating of rabbits, dogs, or horses, regarding them as exclusively pets. But such examples are scarce in comparison to the number of people policed and even murdered for infractions of sexual boundaries. The battles over the hijab in Iran or abortion in the United States show the fierceness of these sexual border wars. Food, in contrast, seems to form an arena of body politics in which boundary crossing is not only tolerated but even celebrated. Both the connections and disjunctures in these two most common foci of corporal politics are striking, and could be a site for longer investigations.

Food Writing and Sex Writing

Turning the question around, what did food studies teach me, then, about studies of sex? If you read the pages of Gastronomica, you might be forgiven for thinking that no one ever had a bad meal. Food scholars gush over the joys of their fieldwork. If you read the pages of Sexualities, in contrast, you might suspect no one ever has good sex. Problems abound in the bedroom. Clearly, food studies can be critical, and Gastronomica is perhaps the best example of this type of writing. Sexuality studies, however, could possibly learn something from food studies about celebrating the textures, tastes, and terroir of the erotic. This is tricky, but that doesn’t obviate the point that academic sex writing is often oblique, technical, and dry. Food writing is both more direct, vivid, and embodied. Good writing mobilizes people, and above all, good writing is read. Visceral prose can more directly pierce the established conceptual and societal boundaries we all seek to question in our research. This is one great merit I see in Gastronomica as a collective enterprise devoted to both scholarly rigor and writerly style. I am now happy to be sitting more often on this side of the table.

And finally, Gastronomica is a collective of members who rotate into and out of editorial duties. This year, Helen Zoe Veit, Josée Johnston, and Simone Cinotto leave us, and we thank them for their devotion and good companionship over the years. Their seats at the editorial table are now taken by Alyshia Gálvez, Irina D. Mihalache, and Rafia Zafar. We look forward to their fresh voices in our continued conversations to make the journal even better, more inclusive, and more accessible to readers and contributors.

—James Farrer, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Tokyo, November 2022

References
Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. “Sex work for the middle classes.” Sexualities 10.4: 473–488.

Bloom, Irene. 1997. “Human Nature and Biological Nature in Mencius.” Philosophy East and West 47.1: 21–32.

Brown, Norman R., and Robert C. Sinclair. 1999. “Estimating Number of Lifetime Sexual Partners: Men and Women Do It Differently.” Journal of Sex Research 36.3: 292–97.

Fahs, Breanne, and Rebecca Plante. 2017. “On ‘Good Sex’ and Other Dangerous Ideas: Women Narrate Their Joyous and Happy Sexual Encounters.” Journal of Gender Studies 26.1: 33–44.

Farrer, James, Haruka Tsuchiya, and Bart Bagrowicz. 2008. “Emotional Expression in Tsukiau Dating Relationships in Japan.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 25.1: 169–88.

Freedman, Paul. 2016. Ten Restaurants That Changed America. New York: Liveright Publishing.

Hall, Edith. 2020. Aristotle’s way: How ancient wisdom can change your life. New York: Penguin.

Hamilton, Paula. 2011. “The Proust Effect: Oral History and the Senses.” In The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, edited by Donald A. Ritchie, 219–33. Oxford, UK: Oxford Academic Press.

Swislocki, Mark. 2008. Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.