Storying Seascapes, Writing Water

Although I’m someone who tries to paint with all the crayons in the box, years ago I fell in love with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes. In his photographic portraits of bodies of water around the world, the artist restricts his palette to black and white and the worlds of grey between the two.

And so I am beatific to have had the opportunity to write what is, one part, a love letter to Sugimoto’s Seascapes and, another part, a polemic against coding water as only blue for Water Cultures, a trilingual exploration of what it’s like to write watery worlds from a slew of disciplines.

Edited by Charlotte Ladevèze, Davide Martino, Eva Rothenberger, and Corinne Fournier Kiss, and published by the University of Fribourg, the book is—hurray!—open access and free to download here. And a thousand thanks to Sugimoto’s Studio for generously gifting my chapter some of his Seascapes.

Writing Appetites and Their Worlds

Next Thursday I’m honoured to be a guest on the Edible Dialogues series, which is organized by the Graduate Association of Food Studies (GAFS) and aims to promote a collaborative environment that develops inner and cross-disciplinary discussion.

Drawing from the experience of writing my first book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada, in tandem with how my research at large straddles food cultural history and the environmental humanities, I will reflect on how genre and appetites collide in how we write food studies scholarship.

All are welcome to join us online on Thursday 24 April at 5pm CET for “Eating With the Trouble: Writing Appetites and their Worlds.” Register here.

'The Abandoners'

What happens if we see motherhood not as a portrait, but as a landscape?

I am beatific to have written my first non-academic book review, which of course disrespects genres by borrowing from the personal essay—titled “A Literary Dictionary of the Mothers Who Leave”—about Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s important The Abandoners: Of Mothers and Monsters.

Thank you kindly, Literary Hub, for hosting my most tender of words and for letting me confess my commitment to leopard print as an aspirational aesthetic.

Special Fermentation Issue of 'Food, Culture & Society'

In November Food, Culture & Society published my article “Time and Microbes, Tides and Bodies,” and it is a frisson of delight to see that the whole issue has now been released.

Guest edited by Mark Stern and Mike Gill, this special issue gathers scholars and practitioners (and those brave enough to test the boundaries between the two) to think about and to think with fermentation.

I am honoured to be in such bright and bubbly company, from author Julia Skinner to art collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club and from chef Eleni Michael to Maya Hey, microbe scholar and friend extraordinare, to name just a handful. And to add a cherry on top, artist Darich Pérez Reyes has graciously shared prints from his fermentation linoleum cut series.

Rooted in the plural, fermentation is always a choir and never a solo. A thousand thanks to Mark and Mike for shepherding this collaborative project and for including my voice.

Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk

Next Monday, 24 March 2025, I’m excited to join the impressive line-up of new titles featured by the University of Stavanger’s Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk Series.

Launched in March 2020 as an effort to connect to communities near and far in response to COVID, the Book Talk Series has now become a leading resource for the latest in environmental humanities scholarship. Each talk takes place online with a live audience and is, then, recorded and added to the series’ virtual library.

Do join us online at 4pm CET on Monday for a preview of my very first book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada, and a discussion with the singular duo behind the Greenhouse: Prof. Dolly Jørgensen and Prof. Finn Arne Jørgensen.

Find the Zoom link and more details here.

Rock, Fish, and Futures

Where does the north begin and end? Is the Canadian North rooted in land or is it anchored at sea, crashing against the slushy liminality of water and ice? And what role—or sway—do east and west play in pinning down and defining “the North”?

Embracing how many different Norths both collide and coalesce in cultural imaginations of the vast lands and waters that are now called Canada, I’m looking forward to the Annual Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries in Berlin next week, where I will ask: Where is Newfoundland—both the first part of the country to be colonized by Europeans and Canada’s youngest province—located in imaginations of the Canadian North?

'Culinary Claims' available for pre-order

It is extremely difficult for me to write this next sentence without cursing or going unprofessionally hard on the exclamation marks, but I wrote a book (!).

I couldn’t be happier to share that my very first monograph—Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada—will be published in March 2025 by the Culinaria series at the University of Toronto Press and is now available to pre-order as a paperback, hardcover, and ebook. The publisher’s website also includes a link for recommending it to libraries and for requesting a desk copy.

The handsome cover is dressed up in a detail of the installation Iini Sookumapii: Guess who’s coming to dinner? by Adrian Stimson for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art. A thousand thanks for the permission to feature this fine artwork, as well as to everyone who made the acknowledgements my favourite chapter to write!

'Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability'

Sometimes words become so promiscuous, so popular, that they feel more like shape-shifters rather than signifiers, which makes it crucial to pause and to ponder what they mean and to whom. Editors Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund take on such a word in Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability. Published by the University of Arkansas Press, this book does not seek to define food sustainability in the singular. Instead, it charts and celebrates the many directions and dimensions that sustainability—as concept, as practice, as ideal—means to those with great influence within food systems: chefs.

It was a treat to have been invited to contribute a chapter to this important collection. “From New York's Silverbird to Santa Fe's Corn Dance Café: Sustaining Indigenous Restaurants” recovers the history of New York City’s first (and tragically only) Indigenous restaurants and introduces what I call Indigenous culinary sustainability.

"Time and Microbes, Tides and Bodies"

In 2018 Artsy declared fermentation “the art world’s strangest new trend.” Why fermentation and art? And why fermentation as art? A trend, by definition, is temporal, prone to disappear as quickly as it appears. Fermentation, in contrast, is about endurance. It is about extending time, about stretching it to last longer, and about making foods—and the worlds that they support—survive.

I’m proud to have contributed my first article to the journal Food, Culture & Society. And I’m prouder still of the two collaborative projects that it documents and the brilliant creatives I had the good fortune of cooking them up with.

The first 50 online copies are free to download, so read more here about time and microbes, tides and bodies, and about fermentation as artistic practice and what I call culinary cruising.

Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food

How is food writing a means with which to document environmental change? This question has been keeping me busy for years and so I’m excited to share the essay that attempts to answer it, “‘The Bitter Taste of Extinction’: Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food,” which was just published in The Literary Journalist as a Naturalist.

Edited by Pablo Calvi, this book is a scholarly anthology that proposes a deep discussion about the multiple ways in which narrative journalism has portrayed nature, human interactions with nature, and the global actions that have attempted to explore it, exploit it, harness it, dominate it, and protect it. This essay collection, in short, offers an academic framework for literary journalistic narratives about nature, and it was a delight to contribute a piece that both critiques and celebrates food writing as a genre.

Stew of the Earth

Furnas, in the Portuguese Azores Islands, is a steam bath of a town. Here the water is hot enough to boil tea and simmer stew. What does treating these underground hot springs like an oven or a crockpot say about the relationship between ingredients and energy and being ecological? Between recipes and the earth?

Writing “Stew of the Earth” for the sixth issue of Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review was (almost) as fun as running my fingers through steaming hot water, boiled directly in the earth. Many thanks to my former colleague Pauline Kargruber for so thoughtfully shepherding this essay.

Codscapes, Found and Lost at Culinaria

In his 1997 bestseller, writer Mark Kurlansky called cod “the fish that changed the world.” But how has the world changed cod? Next Wednesday I will be proposing answers to this question at the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto—a delight times two since this will be my very first talk in my hometown.

One part lecture and one part cooking demonstration, I will share fishy fragments—always dried, mostly salted, and sometimes frozen—from Norway to the Mediterranean and from Newfoundland to the Caribbean to probe the relationship between eating and ecology, between distance and disaster. Find out more and register here.

And many thank to Ethan Murphy for lending me Abandoned Room from his series where the light shines first.

The Last Course

Continually stretching out the culinary trinity of appetizer, main, and dessert, fine dining keeps halving the distance between one course and the next. As soon as the mouth makes one dish disappear, another one appears. And then another one, and another one. Even when a last bite comes into sight, the race goes on, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise.

Many thanks to Berlin Review for inviting me to take on fine dining’s past and present in its sixth issue. “The Last Course” begins with fire and ends with the future, stopping for coffee along the way.

Making Fish on Fogo Island

This fall I’m following the cod to Newfoundland, where I have the great privilege of calling myself the food historian in-residence at Fogo Island Arts as part of its Labrador Current Foodways program (a sentence that causes me to pause and pinch myself no matter how many times I repeat it).

The last weekend of September, Fogo Island Arts is organizing Shore Time: a biannual gathering that celebrates the interaction of art and design, economy and ecology, and, of course, foodways. As part of its program of talks and hikes, exhibitions and meals, I’m looking forward to being in conversation with Timothy Charles, the executive chef of Fogo Island Inn, and Jason Murphy, the foodways advisor to Shorefast, as part of the Fishery Food Circle on 27 September.

Atlantic Appetites: A Culinary Conversation with Rafram Chaddad

How do fish, the culture of their catch, and their preparation create and change Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds? As part of the Water & Sound Festival der Kulturen, I’m chuffed to rehearse answers to this question in dialogue with the artist Rafram Chaddad. Join us in Augsburg on Friday 2 August for stories and snacks about Atlantic cod: “the fish that changed the world.”

Our conversation will weave together tales about cod, movement and migration, cuisine and belonging, and will end with a tasting, both with and without fish. Find out more about Atlantic Appetites here.

Deadlines, Conferences, and Other Disasters

How much distance separates a proposal from a paper? What makes a deadline easy to ignore? And why do so many writers major in procrastination?

Arts of the Working Class, a multi-lingual street journal that examines poverty and wealth, art and society, is a medium and a platform committed to creating sustainable connections between artists, academics, and institutions of all kinds with the most vulnerable members of society. They are also both a guest and a host at EASA Barcelona 2024—the biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. In anticipation of their workshop “Flipping the Coin(ed),” it was great fun to have had the opportunity to reflect on deadlines, conferences, and other disasters. Read my essay here.

Happy birthday, Caesar salad!

Today, on 4 July 2024, Caesar salad turns 100 years old. Well, kind of. Like the anchovies that make its dressing so much more than the sum of its parts, the stories about the origins of America’s most famous salad are slippery.

On the eve of this iconic salad’s birthday, the French newspaper Le Figaro interviewed me to find out more about the reporting I did for my 2019 article“The Surprising Truth About Caesar Salad” for BBC Travel.

Find the feature, penned by Alice Bosio, in the 3 July 2024 print edition of Le Figaro.

The Sparkling Queen of Rheinhessen

At the beginning of April, just as the first buds were about to poke out their heads and make promises about future blossoms, I travelled to Flonheim, Rheinhessen. There I interviewed Alanna LaGamba who, like me, is from Toronto, but, unlike me, is an impressive winemaker. It was a treat to meet her and learn more about how she accidentally moved to the countryside and started making wine, and even more so because the talented Vivi D’Angelo, together with her camera, joined us.

Many thanks to Pellicle for giving our conversation a home, which you can read here.

Codscapes and Culinary Knots

I’m delighted to have been invited to give a talk Monday 20 May by the “The Environmental Afterlives of the Suez Canal” research project based at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Karin Ahlberg, the project’s director, will generously serve as the discussant.

When a fish disappears, what happens to the chips that accompany it? How does the relationship between eating and ecology ebb and flow? And how do cuisines spark and, then, respond to environmental transformations? These questions set up my talk “Codscapes and Culinary Knots,”which will introduce the “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” research group at the University of Augsburg.

Caviar with Chef Nobu

The chefs I’m used to chatting with don’t have Robert De Niro on speed dial. Nor do their names signify a global restaurant empire worth millions. And so when Highsnobiety invited me to interview celebrity sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa last month when he was the star at the Shibuya Crossing Party at the Mandarin Oriental Munich, I couldn’t say no.

Sure, I expected the kind of show-off ingredients that the well-heeled are suckers for—your caviar and champagne, your truffles and once-endangered bluefin tuna—but I didn’t anticipate to talk shop with Nobu about Greek salad and how size (and texture) matters when it comes to feta. Read about my Nobu night here.