Happy as a Clam: Clichés, Climate, and Cuisine

Detail from “Venezia Riparte” by Gianmarco Toma, 2020

Detail from “Venezia Riparte” by Gianmarco Toma, 2020

Next Friday, May 28, I’m delighted to be presenting my research as part of the Environmental Humanities Seminar and Lecture Series - V hosted by the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Eating is one of the most direct ways humans interact with environments by literally digesting them. Food history, thus, reveals how everyday eating practices not only reproduce cultural imaginations of landscapes but also shape actual environments. Narrowing in on seafood, this seminar asks: how do human appetites transform, harm, but also perhaps heal watery worlds? It aims to serve examples of the kinds of stories that food can tell. Spotlighting both Venice and Venice-in-the-world, it assembles a cast of fish and shellfish to consider the relationship between food and place, between ritual and cliché, and between cuisine and climate.

Find more details and the registration instructions here.

"The wet stuff that matters most"

Riot and Roux water issue

Just in time for World Water Day, Riot and Roux!—an independent quarterly publication that explores the intersections of food, power, and social change—released its second issue. And its all about “the wet stuff that matters most: WATER!”

In honour of worlds that are equally salty as they are wet, I wrote about oysters, the power of words and names, and settler colonialism in a piece titled “Self-Portrait, with Shellfish.” Preview the issue here.

Urban Environments Initiative: "Food, Cities, and Environments"

Urban Environments Initiative

The Urban Environments Initiative is an exciting collaborative project between the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), the Technische Universität München (TUM), the University of Cambridge, and New York University. It looks at urban environmental issues, and I am delighted to be a part of it.

Hot off the press, read the positions papers here and my contribution—“‘Urban Soup’: Food, Cities, and Environments”—here.

Food in the Time of COVID-19

Gastronomica

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?

In response to these questions, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies just published its August edition: a collection of 59 “dispatches” from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection is impressively global. Some contributions are funny, others sad, and many anxious. However imperfectly, together they document the early months of lockdown and what it has been like to experience the pandemic around the world.

I am honoured to be one of those 59 accounts. Read “Brotzeit: Dispatch from Munich” here and the whole issue here.

Canadian Culinary Imaginations

Canadian Culinary Imaginations

As of today, Canadian Culinary Imaginations is out in the world! Four years in the making, it clocks in at 2 pounds and 412 pages. Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Shelley Boyd - a literary scholar - and Dorothy Barenscott - an art historian - edited this timely collection of fine essays and artworks. And Vancouver-based artist Jay Cabalu crafted its handsome cover.

I am so proud to have contributed a chapter. “From Meat to Metaphor: Beavers and Conflicting Imaginations of the Edible” dives in deep to the culinary history of Canada’s animal emblem.

The book is available in both hardcover and paperback. Read more about the publication here and the symposium behind the project here.

Review of International American Studies

Review of International American Studies

The latest issue of the Review of International American Studies is now out and is dedicated to an issue very near and dear to my own research interests: Indigenous social movements in the Americas.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Paul Freedman’s impressive Ten Restaurants that Changed America. It fills many gaps in America’s overlooked restaurant history. In my review I mention Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone, a reminder that one cannot talk about food culture in North America without acknowledging Indigenous chefs, ingredients, and their influence.

I am delighted to be in excellent company. To name a few, Mariaelena Anali Huambachano has written about Indigenous foodways in Peru, Elizabeth Hoover about fire and the water protectors at Standing Rock, and Zuzanna Kruk-Buchowska about food sovereignty efforts in the Oneida Nation.

Read my review here, and the rest of issue here.

Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

Oxford food symposium

This weekend I am delighted to be attending the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery for the second time. This year’s theme is food and power and I am thrilled to be on an absolute power panel titled “Feminism.” Chaired by the great Laura Shapiro, Don Lindgren, an antiquarian bookseller, will speak about American community cookbooks and women’s empowerment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Dr. Alex Ketchum, a professor at McGill University’s Institute of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, will discuss the history of feminist restaurants in Canada and the United States in the 1970s and beyond. I will be presenting the paper “Muckamuck: Restaurants, Labour, and the Power of Represention” about the first Indigenous-themed restaurant in urban Canada.