A Cuisine Without Locals

It’s no secret that Venice is one of my favourite places on the planet (even though I will never forgive its humidity for what it does to my hair). It’s not because of its good looks or dramatic light, salty wines or endless art exhibitions. Instead, it’s because of its people: Venetians and new Venetians brave enough to make this at times impossible place their home, and who have generously taught me so much about community and cities and what it means to belong to both.

For the third issue of Tomato Tomato, which is published by Alicia Kennedy, a food writer that I could not admire more, I had the privilege of writing about what it means to “eat like a local” in a place where there are fewer and fewer of them. It was an honour that some of these locals trusted me with their words and stories, and so my deepest gratitude goes to Fulvia Larena, Valeria Necchio, and Fabio Cavallari of the collective Barena Bianca.

Appetites and their Shores

Hosted by Laura Otto’s Chair of European Ethnology at the University of Würzburg, the Gone Fishing? lecture series invites reflections on the past, present, and future of human relationships with water bodies and the worlds that they stage.

This Thursday, 9 July, the Off the Menu team will join the discussion to share our work on eating and ecology. Appetites, or so they seem, are boundless, but squid are not. Spotlighting the eating that drives fishing, we will present a lecture in three parts. The first will introduce the relationship food studies has to coasts and water. From a post-industrial fish to overshucked oysters and overlooked sea urchins and from shameful last bites to a squid that once was, we will consider the role that docks and shores play as both beginnings and endings to histories about humans and creatures of the sea. The second part surveys how “Off the Menu” aims, in homage to John R. Gillis, to fill food history’s “blue hole,” and the third theorizes the role that eating, at large, plays in the past, present, and future of aquatic life management.

The series is online and open to all to join.

The Hungry Historians

Last week I joined the lovely Kelly Spring and Matt Phillpott in conversation for an episode of their podcast The Hungry Historians.

A celebration of the leading writers in food and drink, it was heaps of fun to be included in such inspiring company. We spoke about my first book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada, and zoomed in on the symbolism of restaurants and the role of food in settler colonialism.

In/tangible connections

How do global interactions and connections fire friction and spark delay? What forms do stories of such disconnections take, and how do they smell and sound and taste?

This week I am looking forward to participating in the “In/tangible Connections: Material, Embodied, and Sensory Stories of Global Dis:Connection” Workshop organized by Kate Stevens and Erika Zerwes at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect in Munich.

Combining a photo essay with a performative lecture, my contribution, “A Fish Without a Head,”will share some of my reflections on cod fragmentation and the afterlives of salt.

Transatlantic Dialogues on Food, Culture, and Power

Image by Collectif Enoki

Paris, to point out the obvious, is of course a great city for eating, but is also an equally great city for thinking about eating.

And so it is a pleasure to do both this Friday, where I will participate as a commentator in the “Transatlantic Dialogues on Food, Culture, and Power” Workshop carefully crafted by Mathilde Cohen and Christy Shields and hosted by the American University of Paris.

To provide both food for thought and thought for food, the workshop will conclude with an edible tablescape by the artist Joanna Wong, who is a co-founder of Collectif Enoki.

A Culinary Environmental Humanities Forum

As May turns into June, the Off the Menu team will gather creative practitioners and academic researchers who all work critically and creatively with food for three days at the Ammersee in Bavaria for what we are calling an environmental humanities forum. We will think and cook and, of course, eat together, and I couldn’t be more excited to co-host so much thought for food.

EHL Brown Bag Seminar

Next week I will be returning to my beloved Stockholm and am grateful to have the opportunity to share my research with the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory community on Thursday 21 May.

What do recipes, let alone restaurants, have to do with the environment? Eating, as I argue, is always an ecological act. It not only stories the earth, but also shapes it. Reflecting on this relationship, I will introduce the cast of wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways and Canadian regulations that star in my 2025 book Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada.

Register for the seminar here. All are welcome to join.

Emergency Blankets in Venice

First created for space missions—a literal gold and silver sign of Cold War optimism—emergency blankets now mark human conflicts and ecological crises. For the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, Velimir Zernovski has replicated Michelangelo’s Pietà, cocooning it in emergency blankets that not only glitter like gold but, more importantly, question fragile relations, shared conditions of exposure, and uncertain futures.

Curated by Tihomir Topuzovski, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, and the art historian Amanda Boetzkes, I’m lucky to have joined the conversation sparked by the North Macedonia Pavilion’s suturing of the familiar with the strange, of polyester with polycrisis, and it was an honour to speak to Amanda about Zernovski’s installation and the many meanings of blankets and emergencies and plastic.

Re-election to the ASFS Board

Founded in 1985, the ASFS promotes the interdisciplinary study of food and society and has done tremendous work in both advancing and celebrating food studies as a dynamic field of research, writing, and teaching.

Three years ago I was elected to the Board, and I am humbled that its members have re-elected me for a second three-year term.

Audio recording of Stew of the Earth

A couple of autumns ago, Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review published my essay “Stew of the Earth” and, last week, added an audio recording.

You can now listen to me read the piece here.

On Tables, Tongues, and Saltfish Tales

It is a great honour, not to mention delight, to be returning to San Juan on Saturday 7 March to deliver a keynote at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in dialogue with its current exhibition, Trópico Agridulce, curated by Alexandra Méndez García.

Caribbean food cultures are thick with codfish, but their local waters are not. Contemporary cuisines therefore archive not only how this fish from icy, northern seas, to quote Mark Kurlansky, changed the world but also how the world has changed cod.

My lecture On Tables, Tongues, and Saltfish Tales will share stories about cod’s historical and contemporary colonial entanglements and about time and temperature and salt.

Cod and its Oil, Cuisine and its Supplements

The history of global capitalism is one of casting vegetables, animals, and minerals–and everything in between–as “resources” that can be bought in one place and then sold in another. What role do edible fats play in this history?

Edited by Elena Kochetkova, Matthias Heymann, and Ines Prodöhl, this special issue of Global Environment: A Journey of Transdisciplinary History turns it attention to “Global fat resources: Connecting themes, approaches, and narratives, c. 1850–2020s.” Contributors highlight all kinds of edible oils and fats, from seeds and soybeans to coconuts and palm fruits.

Adding one of the fishy examples, my article “Cod and its Oil, Cuisine and its Supplements” draws from my research in Newfoundland, asking: What makes a resource “natural”?

New Books in Environmental Humanities

At the end of this month I’m delighted to return to Venice—a city that never fails to melt my knees and electrify my heart—to present Culinary Claims at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

It was in Venice that my doctoral research matured and grew into a book, and so I’m honoured to be able to share this work with the city that hosted my while I penned its first draft.

My gratitude goes to Francesca Tarocco for the invitation and to Fulvia Larena for generously serving as the discussant.

Please join us at Aula Baratto at 4pm on Friday 30 January.

Colonial Codscapes

I’m excited to attend the 2025 American Studies Association Annual Meeting this week in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This year’s conference casts its attention to the theme of “Late-Stage American Empire?” and I am looking forward to contributing to the “Edible Imperialisms” panel organized by the Critical Food Studies Caucus.

My presentation traces colonial cod connections between San Juan and Saint John’s to ask: Why does an island in the Caribbean famous for its fishing import salt cod—so stiff, so dry that it needs to be soaked and rinsed and rehydrated—from icy northern waters?

The Invention of Fish

What makes a fish fresh? Is it the proximity between life and death? Or the relationship between temperature and time? And how has food science and technology transformed freshness and the criteria to which it is tethered?

On Monday 17 November, I am excited to run with these questions in my lecture “The Invention of Fish” at the Detusches Museum, Munich, as part of its joint TUM History of Tech Professorship Oberseminar Series. I am most grateful to Professor Tamar Novick for this chance to share my research on the other side of the Isar and to the great thinker of wetness Dilip Da Cunha for inspiring my title.

Cod, Cabot, and the History of Salt

On the last (and spookiest) day of October, I look forward to sharing my research with my colleagues at the University of Augsburg. Titled Cod, Cabot, and the History of Salt, I will present my work about global codscapes and about foodways found and lost at the fifth meeting of The Network of Environmental History.

Recipes and Ingredients and RELISH

What is a recipe and what exactly is it that one does? Sure, a recipe can give you directions to dinner, but what other worlds does it story and perhaps even build?

Organized within the framework of RELISH (Reframing European Gastronomy Legacy through Innovation, Sustainability and Heritage), a European Union Horizon project, next week I’m excited to return to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, for the workshop “Recipes and Gastronomy as Cultural Heritage: Meaning, Methodology, and Media.” My paper—Tongues and their Mothers, Ingredients and their Understudies—considers the politics of names and substitutions by asking: When does a recipe stop being one dish and, instead, turns into another?

Plates and Other Collisions

The Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment research group, which I lead at the University of Augsburg, is excited to share that we are currently accepting applications from researchers and practitioners interested in all the ways that eating and ecology intersect to join us for a culinary environmental humanities forum in Bavaria in June 2026.

Find the call and more details on our website.

The Northrop Frye Centre Distinguished Lecture

It is an immense privilege to share that I have been invited to deliver this year’s Northrop Frye Centre Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toronto.

The story is the spice, it’s the seasoning, the salt, says one chef. It is stories that flavour food—something to think about every time a recipe instructs you to “salt to taste.” But salt does not season food alone. Salt spikes the water. It lines the rocks. It thickens the air. Salt behaves and misbehaves in terms of where it shows up, and how much of it. Just as climate change is largely a story about water—too much in some places, too little elsewhere, and temperatures that are too high—salt traces environments past, present, and future. Braiding together salt, stories, and other survival skills, I will present a lecture about preservation, time, and environmental futures.

If you’re in the city, one that I am lucky enough to call my hometown, please join on 6 October for Salt, Stories, and Other Survival Skills, at Victoria College at 5pm, followed by a reception.

The Built Ocean

Architecture, as a practice and as a discipline, needs solid ground and yet shorelines ebb and flow, refusing to commit to a single line that separates water from land. This introduces the idea of an architecture of the sea, a theme that’s the lodestar of “The Built Ocean” conference, hosted by the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto from September 10 to 13, and that I’m most excited to be presenting at in the company of so many fellow watery researchers.

Thinking about what I call codscapes, my contribution to the Animals panel is set on Fogo Island and begins with my first night in saltbox house, which taught me that here and in other Newfoundland outports buildings, like shorelines, don’t stay still. In response my paper, Split, Salted, and Staged, will spotlight the Newfoundland fishing stage as an example of liminal and amphibious heritage that is equal parts material, cultural, and environmental.