Before I became a food studies scholar, I was a food writer. Or at least I aspired to be. By day I worked in contemporary art, liaising with artists and tracking down the likes of emergency fork-lifts for installing exhibitions. By night I read cookbooks, treating them like field guides to other worlds. Darra Goldstein’s A Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia was one such title. When I was invited to a wedding in the Georgian countryside, I packed it in my suitcase and reached for it when my marshrutka passed by a stretch of highway contoured by women selling bread. When I was drafting an article for VICE—“Some of the Best Bread in Georgia Is Found on the Side of the Highway”—I reached out to her. In addition to generously sharing her time and correcting my spelling, her biography introduced me to Gastronomica: The Food Studies Journal.

All of this is to say that I started reading Gastronomica first as a writer and then as a scholar, and that I could not be more proud to now be a member of its Editorial Collective.