Food Movements, Moving Food, and Unbordering

How can we better understand food practices by viewing them through the lens of movement? Entitled Food Movements / Moving Food , Umbra’s 2022 Biennial Conference on Food, Sustainability, and Environment addresses what happens when people and food products move through regional, national, and international networks.

What are the effects of these movements on local, regional, national, and international communities and cultures? What additional actions and reactions do they precipitate?

The conference aims to respond to such questions in Perugia, Italy, June 9 to 12. I am delighted to be chairing the “Migration” panel. I will also present the paper “Unbordering a Movement: Indigenous Chefs and State Lines.” What happens when political boundaries influence the movement of ingredients? And what happens when these borders police whom may travel and with what? What are the culinary and political consequences? Focusing on the lands now called Canada and the United States, my paper traces the ways state, provincial, and national borders influence the contemporary Indigenous Food Movement. I also map how Indigenous chefs, restaurateurs, and caterers resist these borders.

Today's Special: Reading Menus as Cultural Texts

What is food? A thing we eat, a creator of cultures, an all-encompassing system? An object, a process, a way of understanding ourselves? A way to altogether reimagine study and practice in the first place?

Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement is a new open-access textbook. Speaking to early undergraduate learners, it brings together 60 chapters that cover themes ranging from cultural identity to the financialization of food, breastfeeding to the foodways of rural Kyrgyzstan, eating disorders to backyard chicken farming.

I had the pleasure of contributing a chapter that draws from my experience teaching food studies at LMU Munich. Each of my classes assigns a menu analysis. But how can you look beyond your own appetite in order to read menus as cultural texts? “Today’s Special” answers this question. And this video offers a preview of my chapter.

Food Studies: Matter, Meaning, Movement is available for free online, both as a PDF and as an e-publication.

"The Bitter Taste of Extinction"

How is food writing a means for environmental activism? In answer to this question, I’m pleased to be presenting a paper at the American Society for Environmental History’s 2022 Conference.

Titled “‘The Bitter Taste of Extinction’: Writing the Environmental Crisis Through Food,” my paper considers how American food writing represents, activates, or seeks to preserve the environment by surveying the genre’s growing environmental consciousness.

The conference takes place in Eugene, Oregon, March 23 to 27. Learn more about it here.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Eaten Magazine - an independent magazine celebrating the history of food - has dedicated its latest issue to the most important meal of the day.

Breakfast, as Issue 13 reveals, is full of a veritable buffet of stories to help you start your day, from the evolution of a perfect hangover cure to the invention of the All-American breakfast to the udder-chaos of a milk promotional campaign gone wrong.

I had too much fun writing about how last night’s booze haunts this morning’s breakfast, which is to say the history of the Bloody Mary and other hangover cures. Browse the issue here.

Eating the Future

The future is typically not my business. This is not to say it isn’t of interest but, as a historian, it is not part of my job profile to imagine it. This is why the work of Katinka Versendaal—a food designer and “gastronomic futurologist”—makes me curious. What Katinka proposes with her food design studio—the Eatelier—moves beyond forecasting culinary trends. This is not about looking at the past and using it as a crystal ball to predict future outcomes. Instead, Katinka applies speculative design thinking to gastronomy to ask: is this the future we want?

It was a pleasure to interview Katinka for The Preserve Journal. Preview issue 6 here.

A Seat at the Table

From McDonald’s in Moscow to Starbucks in Shanghai, American food is simply everywhere. But why and how? And beyond being fast, what exactly is American food?

As part of the Atlantische Akademie’s Let’s Talk America series, I am excited to give a talk on Wednesday January 26, titled “A Seat at the Table: Food in America and American Food in the World.” Find out more about the event and register here.

Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment at KWI Essen

How do human appetites shape plants and animals, land and water, the world’s present and its future?

Next Wednesday January 19, I’m delighted to be giving a talk in answer to this question at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” will present my current research about culinary reactions to climate change. It will reflect on how humans know, endanger, and—perhaps—even conserve flora, fauna, and their habitats through culinary practices.

Find out more about the talk and the link to register here.

America and its Road Movies

Just in time for the holidays, the Review of International American Studies has published its latest issue, titled “Car Culture(s): Machines, Roads, Mythologies.”

It is a delight to have contributed to it with the article “Buddies, Lovers, and Detours: America and its Road Movies.” It asks: Is an open road also a democratic one? The article zooms in on the films Queen & Slim and Unpregnant to discuss the American road movie genre from the perspective of 2021 and how contemporary film narratives intersect with race and gender.

Many thanks to the students in my 2019-2020 course “Head Out on the Highway: The Cultural History of the American Road Movie” at LMU Munich’s Amerika-Institut. This one’s for you. Thanks for expanding my own views of the genre and for such lively (and fun) discussions.

On Ice: Life and Lunch at Mercato di Rialto

According to a new journal just released by Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, Venice - and its lagoon - is a privileged location for sensing and interrogating the effects of human activity and climate change regarding the biological, cultural, and social dynamics of local ecosystems. And its title - Lagoonscapes: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities - reflects exactly this position.

In its inaugural issue I ask: How does shopping at Venice’s famous market - Mercato di Rialto - help Venetians and visitors alike feel connected to the lagoon? And to the foods they eat?

Visitors consume Venice’s Mercato di Rialto most often with their eyes and cameras. Venetians, in contrast, consume it with their mouths. During the week they voice their orders gently, but on Saturday mornings shopping lists become full-volume announcements that compete against the market noise. By analysing the history and role of the Pescheria at Rialto Market and its culinary and cultural representations, this article considers the entanglement between seafood and people, ice and freshness, and life and lunch. Read “On Ice” here.

Judith Beck's Burgenland

Shining a spotlight on natural wine, Pipette is an independent, print-only magazine. Founded by natural wine journalist Rachel Signer, it shares the stories of small natural wine producers and their communities.

Issue 10 will be the final edition of Pipette and so it is even more of a thrill to have contributed to its grand finale and to be in such excellent company.

I travelled to Burgenland to interview Judith Beck about her prolific range of wines, the process of converting her vineyards to biodynamics, and how she found her own “style” as a winemaker.

The issue is available to preview and order here.

Venice is Leaking

The Anthropocene Campus Venice is a one-week forum around the theme of Water Politics in the Age of the Anthropocene, organized by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, and the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City.

It is set in the framework of the Anthropocene Curriculum, a collaborative project initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, both in Berlin.

It takes place in Venice October 11 to 16 and it has been inspiring and expanding to organize one of the four seminars together with my dear colleagues Heather Contant and Ifor Duncan. Read more about “Venice is Leaking: Interventions in the Lagoon-City Continuum” here and about the ACV public events program here.

A Return to the Rachel Carson Center

It is a joy to return to my alma mater, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, as its new editorial director.

Read more about the RCC and its many activities here.

Citrus and Seasonal Nostalgia

Based in New York, Salt & Pepper is a literary magazine about food, with recipes. It publishes both fiction and nonfiction and recipes accompany all of its stories. Quite literally providing food for thought, it aims to shed the one-time-read nature of literary magazines by including recipes that can become staples in your kitchen.

A magazine that leaves the bookshelf or coffee table and takes residence next to your stove.

Its latest issue explores nostalgia and its many flavours. It is a great pleasure to have my musings included and to write about citrus, Venice, and (confused) seasonal nostalgia. With recipes of course. One sweet (Blood Oranges and Honey Pistachios) and one savoury (Kumquat Salsa Verde).

Preview the issue here.

ASFS Member Spotlight

Photo of L. Sasha Gora by Vivi D’Angelo for Das Blaue Wunder, Munich

Founded in 1985, the ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) is a lively community of scholars promoting the interdisciplinary study of food.

It was a delight to speak with Alanna K. Higgins, who interviewed me for the ASFS’s Member Spotlight series. We discussed my research, advice for an international career, climate change, public scholarship, and my favourite knife.

Read the interview here.

Planting a Menu

Can lunch be a lecture? How do eating and research practices intersect? And what can a recipe reveal about plants beyond human appetites?

I’m looking forward to STREAMS: Transformative Environmental Humanities, which kicks off tomorrow online. I am pleased to be participating in a stream organized by Anna Svensson, titled “A Green Turn? How plants are shaping the Environmental Humanities landscape.” I will be presenting the paper “Planting a Menu: An Edible Essay.” Find out more about the conference here.

The Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award

I am over the moon to have received this year’s Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award. Vielen, vielen Dank!

It is an immense honour to have my doctoral dissertation “Culinary Claims: A Cultural History of Indigenous Restaurants in Canada” recognized by the BAA and I am most grateful for its support.

Memory and Culinary Conflicts

From layers to waves, memories overlap, pile-up, and even sink under all of this weight. In dialogue with these layers of overlap, the Memory Studies Association Fifth Annual Conference is titled “Convergences.” Taking place online from July 5-9, the city of Warsaw is its host and provides an environment that illuminates the program. How do the local practices, traditions, and studies compare to the global ones? And how does the intertwining of human and non-human, digital and analog affect our memories?

I am pleased to be participating in one of two conference panels dedicated to “Fractured Memory of the Colonial Encounter: Canada and the Indigenous Present.” The paper I will present is titled “Culinary Conflicts: Memory, Indigenous Restaurants, and Cultural Encounters.”

Find more about the conference here.

Un/Known Urban Natures

Based on two years of lively discussions, the Urban Environments Initiative is hosting an online conference from June 30 to July 2: Irritations and Unforeseen Consequences of the Urban.

I’m delighted to be part of Working Group 1: Un/Known Urban Natures. Together with Raúl Acosta, Joseph Adeniran Adedeji, Maan Barua, Matthew Gandy, and Kara Schlichting, we will be discussing the various layers of urban nature that coexist in cities around the world.

I will be discussing water, colour, and perceptions of urban nature in Venice, Italy.

Find out more about the conference, including the program and registration link, here.

Eating with the Lagoon

Established by TBA21–Academy and appropriately based in Venice, Ocean Space hosts exhibitions, research, and public programs that catalyze ocean literacy through the arts.

It is an immense pleasure to be collaborating with chef Marco Bravetti and food designer Katinka Versendaal on an event in partnership with Ocean Space and the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.

A recipe for salt calls for two ingredients: the sea and the sun. But what is the recipe for Venice? The city of Venice emerged from salt marshes—from the labor of tides carrying seawater back and forth, in and out. As a “forest on the sea,” Venice is a balancing act and salt knows a thing or two about balance. Salt executes order. It conducts how an ingredient behaves. Too little and even a confident legume tastes like something is missing. Too much and drought spreads across the mouth. The human appetite for salt, as the anthropologist Margaret Visser points out, reveals that we are in fact “walking marine environments.” The sea in our mouths. The lagoon on our tongues. But as much as salt preserves—keeping ingredients in line and flavors in balance—it also damages and erodes. In dialogue with salt’s duality, Ciacoe in Tocio: Idee, Conversazioni, e Sughi per Mangiare con la Laguna (Ideas, Conversations, and Sauces for Eating with the Lagoon) draws from Venice’s past and present to reimagine its future.

An afternoon of culinary conversations, this event casts food as a critical means with which to experience Venice and its lagoon. The table becomes a laboratory for understanding and shaping saltwater worlds and coastal futures. Eating becomes a method of inquiry.

Calling for a move away from an exclusive focus on terrestrial food politics, cultural studies scholar Elspeth Probyn asks: “can we eat with the ocean?” She wonders: “How to eat the ocean well?” We speculate answers to these questions. Can Venice eat with the lagoon?

Find out more about the June 20 event and book a seat here.

The Tourist Trap: Culinary Imaginations of Venice

From June 9-15, four food studies organizations have joined forces to host an impressive and important online conference: Just Food: because it is never just food. Centred on the theme of Food Justice, the programme is rich in much urgent food for thought.

I’m excited to be part of a panel discussing culinary tourism. Moderated by Beth Forrest, I am in excellent company and am thrilled to be sharing this panel with Shayan Lallani (presenting on cosmopolitan cruise ship dining), Lucy Long (presenting on virtual tourism in the time of COVID-19), Jonatan Leer (presenting on sustainable food tourism with a focus on the Nordic region), and Michelle-Marie Gilkeson (presenting on sensory devices in food-focused travel shows). My paper discusses (over)tourism, restaurants, and the weight of culinary imaginations of Venice.

Find out more about the conference here.