food systems – Gastronomica

Podcast Dispatches from Issue 21.2: Rob Connoley

May 3, 2021May 10, 2021Gastronomica

For our fifth series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Meant to Be Eaten on Heritage Radio Network, we sit down (virtually) with authors who have contributed to our upcoming second issue of 2021, featuring articles on topics including commensality and creative collaboration, the politics of food systems, and race and representation.

For this inaugural episode of our Summer 2021 season, Editorial Collective member Daniel Bender welcomes chef Rob Connoley to discuss culinary collaboration and the roots of Ozark cuisine at his research-driven restaurant, Bulrush. Drawing on his experiences of shared knowledge creation with a range of local academic and culture partners, Connoley helps bring place-based storytelling to the forefront of culinary creation.

Podcast Dispatches from Issue 21.1: John Broadway

January 21, 2021May 10, 2021Gastronomica

For our fourth series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Meant to Be Eaten on Heritage Radio Network, we sit down (virtually) with authors who have contributed to our upcoming first issue of 2021, which continues to feature COVID-19 Dispatches, but also original research articles around the themes of the relationship between food, power and politics, cultivating relationships, and sustaining memories.

For this episode, Editorial Collective Co-Chair Daniel Bender is joined by John Broadway to discuss his forthcoming article, “Around the World in 50 Restaurants: The Curious Irony of Hyperlocal Food,” which examines the paradox generated by a global restaurant ranking system which (at least in the years prior to the pandemic) promoted haute cuisine to elite, “hypermobile” customers travelling the world to eat “hyperlocal” food in celebrated restaurants. Commenting on restaurant rankings, access and exclusivity, Broadway positions this phenomenon in light of staggering inequality in contemporary food systems.

Food in the time of COVID-19: Call for Submissions

April 6, 2020April 11, 2020Gastronomica

Lockdowns, social distancing, quarantines, and simple fear in a time of uncertainty highlight the challenges of provisioning, the experiences of food workers, and the essential services food shops, hawkers, street vendors, bars, restaurants, markets, farms, and many more play in providing not only sustenance but also the liveliness upon which we depend in daily life.

The Gastronomica Editorial Collective is seeking dispatches about food in the time of COVID-19. We seek as many diverse voices as possible, from as many affected, infected places as possible to provide a snapshot in time. We know that even as this next issue will go to press, the situation in many places may have worsened (but, hopefully, improved). We are, though, already immersed in stories and narratives of resilience that deserve to be remembered and documented. We seek, therefore, reflections in resilience. How do people feed themselves in times of crisis? What is the role of community and social ties in feeding ourselves, families, the ill, and each other? How has the crisis both highlighted the essential services provided by food workers and the precarity of those services?

We invite shorter pieces (100-1000 words) in the form of personal dispatches drawn from lived experience: portraits, creative non-fiction, telephonic/digital interviews, photographs and other images, and more. If you are, or you know, someone who would like their voice heard, but might not have the time to put words to paper, please be in touch and we can arrange a conversation or interview with a collective member. We are eager to read, listen, and share.

Submissions can be sent directly to gastrome@ucpress.edu with the subject line “Food & Covid,” followed by your name and submission title. Please include a brief cover letter that can function as both an abstract and author bio, and include a word count. (If you have any citations, they should follow our general submission guidelines at https://gcfs.ucpress.edu/content/submit.) Please include (in-text) the date, place, and if possible, time, of writing in all submissions.

In an effort to document, recall, and portray particular moments in the coming months, we are offering rolling submission deadlines.

First submissions by: 10 April

Second submissions by: 25 April

(We anticipate running more dispatches in forthcoming issues.)

*(Empty shelves in a usually well-stocked supermarket in Cape Town, South Africa)*

Consumer Citizenship: A Preview of the Gastronomica/SOAS Distinguished Lecture | Amita Baviskar

May 3, 2017May 12, 2017Gastronomica

Since 2014, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies has partnered with University of London’s SOAS Food Studies Centre to co-sponsor a Distinguished Lecture Series for leading scholars, students, journalists, practitioners and members of the public to engage in critical conversations about the nature of food, the interconnectivity of contemporary food systems, the role of food in daily life, and emerging trends in food studies.

Across northern India, roadside stalls and restaurants announce themselves as ‘Maggi Point’ and ‘Maggi Corner.’ Maggi, a brand of instant noodles introduced in the late 1980s, is now not only a popular snack, but the favorite comfort food of an entire generation of young urban Indians. What is the secret of Maggi’s success? And what does it tell us about taste and desire in the heart of a consumer economy in a deeply unequal society?

I began noticing products like Maggi noodles when they first appeared in village shops. Surely the novelty of splurging on these brightly packaged bits of junk must be limited to the well-off few, I wondered. However, such products were soon crowding each other on grocery shelves. What I was witnessing was part of an explosion in the consumption of industrial foods, as Jack Goody called mass-manufactured edible commodities produced and distributed by corporate firms.

My growing interest in the life of industrial foods has led me to students and migrant squatter settlements, street vendors and supermarkets, advertising companies and processing plants, television studios and government offices as I follow the threads of how instant noodles are produced, distributed and consumed. At first glance, this seemed to be a familiar story about the commodification of diets in an era of economic liberalization. Soon, however, I came to realize that it was also about citizenship, about poor and low-caste people who continue to be denied social and economic rights striving for respect and dignity. The success of instant noodles is partly sparked by their aspiration to belong to a nation increasingly defined by the consumption of fetishized commodities.

Instant noodles also compel us to look more closely at youth and how their tastes dictate food practices within households, overturning the standard narrative about Indian families, age, and patriarchal power. This simmering broth of social relations which industrial foods add to and transform is a critical part of India’s cultural landscape. It’s exciting to be able to contribute to a subject that concerns public policy on nutrition and health.

Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She studies the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. Her current research looks at food practices and the transformation of agrarian environments in western India. Baviskar has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale, SciencesPo and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.

The SOAS Food Studies Centre is an interdisciplinary centre dedicated to the study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food, historically and in the contemporary moment, from production, to exchange, to preparation, to consumption. The Centre’s primary purposes are to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at SOAS and to facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in food studies.

Image credits: Maggi Masala noodles by Sixth6sense – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40729391; Magi Goreng noodles, as served at Restoran Khaleel, Gurney Drive, Penang, Malaysia By amrufm [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons