The Necklace and the Pea

Based in London while spanning the world, Where the Leaves Fall is a magazine that considers local and global experiences and knowledge as a pathway to healing our relationship with nature, with culture, with community, and with the Earth. It explores humankind’s connection with nature through the intersection between social justice and the environment, art, science, culture, philosophy, and food.

Its fourteenth issue spotlights landscape, kinship, and connection, and I am delighted to have contributed a text about eating and ecology titled “The Necklace and the Pea.”

Learn more about the issue here and read the article here, which is accompanied by a gorgeous illustration by Sinae Park.

Convivial Tables

The table, in many ways, is not only a stage but also a map. Critically considering the connections between eating and ecology, TBA21’s Ocean Space has been hosting a series in Venice titled Convivial Tables that brings together artists and scientists, chefs and activists to reflect on the intimate relationship the table has with environments both near and afar.

The publication Entrée: The Pannier of the Venice Lagoon further expands on the conversations that the Ocean Space table has hosted thus far, and I am chuffed to have contributed the text “Let Them Eat (Blue) Crab” which reflects on so-called invasive species. Read the publication here.

Food and Body in Colonial Contexts

Next week I am most looking forward to participating in the workshop “Food and Body in Colonial Contexts in Pre-Modern Times.”

Hosted by the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the University of Regensburg, it will bring together scholars of colonialism and food focused on different regions of the world. Furthermore, it aims to enable exchange and development of methodologies and concepts of dietary cultural encounters in colonial settings and to broaden the scope of existing research to incorporate less studied regions.

I will present the paper “‘Baked Alaska’: Culinary Borders and Muktuk in the North American Arctic,” which considers what I call the politics of delicacies and the history of whale meat as a colonial encounter.

More information and the workshop program are available here.

Planetary Habitability

How do different social and political assumptions behind any understanding of planetary boundaries affect the possibilities for understanding each other, the measurability of the planet at multiple scales, and the possibility of agreeing on and implementing effective countermeasures?

Last October I had the pleasure of participating in Where is the Planetary? at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. In an experimental setting designed by artist Koki Tanaka, scientists, scholars, and artists shared perspectives on planetary practice: from zooming out to the cosmic, grounding back to our geological Earth and personal biographies, to exploring the ethics of repair and care and the vision of a second primordial soup for planetary survival.

The rich weekend of discussions lives on in a series of videos by Koki Tanaka, which are available to watch here and begin with Day 1.

On Day 2 our group tackled questions of planetary habitability through culinary cooperation, which you can watch here. The simple question of to what extent different recipes may or may not successfully combine into one opened up space to discuss a seemingly unsolvable problem: How can we foster effective planetary collaboration despite differences, antagonisms and unequal historical responsibilities?

Cooking in Circles

Next Friday I am delighted to be participating in the International Symposium: Circularity at Seoul National University’s Institute for Culture and Arts. The symposium’s second track considers “Socio-Ecosystems of the Future” and will be introduced by Jihoi Lee (curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) and moderated by Professor Hong-jung Kim (SNU).

In the inspiring company of Soik Jung (co-artistic director of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial 2023) and In-ah Shin (co-organizer of Feminist Designer Social Club), my talk will consider the symposium’s theme through a culinary lens.

How do we relate to the environment through the foods we eat and the stories we season them with? In Cooking in Circles I will survey the relationship between eating and ecology. My lecture collects examples of cooking as a collaborative cultural practice that reveals connections and proposes alternatives for being in relation with the flora and fauna different culinary traditions call food. Taken together, this collection narrates how materials, flavours, and ideas circulate from one context to another, how they mingle, merge, and melt into each other, and how cuisines relate to climate, how appetites shape futures.

Find out more about the program and the other tracks, and register here. The event will also be live streamed.

Off the Menu at the University of Augsburg

It is an honour—and then some—to share the good news: I have received funding from the Elite Network of Bavaria to establish a junior research group at the University of Augsburg.

Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment will bring together food studies and the environmental humanities to introduce what I call the “culinary environmental humanities.” In partnership with Augsburg’s international doctoral program, Um(Welt)Denken, our goal is to spotlight culturally shaped eating practices as key sites of environmental transformation and, thus, rethink the environment through a culinary lens.

My deepest gratitude goes to the University of Augsburg, its IDK, my mentors, and to the Elite Network of Bavaria. Danke, danke, danke! Read the press release here (in German).

I cannot wait to get Off the Menu up and running in May 2023. Also, I will be hiring two doctoral researchers and look forward to sharing more details later this year.

Appetites and Other Ghosts

In a 1996 article in The New Yorker, Susan Orlean chronicles what she calls “the homesick restaurant.” It isn’t her homesickness she refers to. In contrast to those frequenting a restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana—one that remembers the one they left behind—she confesses, “There has never been anything in my life that I couldn't go back to if I really wanted to.” The restaurant she writes about serves those who are homesick for a different place, a different time. But what if we add up those different places and times so that they equal environments, so that the sum they make is the planet?

I am looking forward to tackling this question next week at KWI, where I will present my research as part of its Wednesday Colloquium. My talk will consider extinction through a culinary lens. Zooming in on substitutions—their practices, discourses, and politics—I ask: How do cuisines chart, mourn, and perhaps even aim to counter environmental loss? Appetites and Other Ghosts will survey my current work on the relationships between restaurants and politics, food and migration, and cuisine and planetary health.

The Colloquium is hybrid, which means that all are welcome to join online. Find out more and register here.

Let Them Eat Cake Mix

The fog falls like lace. It obscures any chance of a clear line that separates land from water, water from sky. A woman wades through the mud with a bucket and thick rubber gloves. She walks toward a crowd knee-deep in the water net fishing for salmon. This image sets the scene of journalist and food writer Julia O’Malley’s The Whale and the Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska.

It also accompanies the book’s introduction: “What Why How We Eat.” No question mark, no punctuation. It does, however, reveal the picture’s GPS: “There is most likely no more democratic fishing spot in America than Kenai, Alaska,” claims O’Malley. An estimated ninety thousand people across the state annually share four hundred thousand sockeye, the majority of which come from the Kenai.

I had the pleasure of reviewing The Whale and the Cupcake for H-Net. Read the rest of the review here.

Life, Death, and Dinner Among the Molluscs

Food systems need to shift, but how? How might we shape them to nourish humans, animals, and the planet? Edited by Kathleen Kevany and Paolo Prosperi, Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets takes these questions to task and gathers 55 chapters that illuminate solutions on environment, health, and well-being, education and public engagement, political processes, and creative approaches to social policies and purposeful design of food environments.

I’m pleased to have had the chance to spotlight shellfish in my chapter “Life, Death, and Dinner Among the Molluscs: Human Appetites and Sustainable Aquaculture.”

This is an absolute meal of a book, which the price unfortunately reflects. And so I would encourage you to ask your local library to order the e-book or pre-order the hardback so that is is available to many. Find out more here.

Wheatscapes and Culinary Ghosts

For my final act at Delfina Foundation for Season 5 of The Politics of Food, it is a delight to be part of a collective event with my fellow international resident Maya Marshak and our invited collaborator David Bates. Together the three of us will explore the idea of environmental and culinary ghosts through the mediums of paint, moving image, a lecture presentation, and the sharing of food on Wednesday 14 December.

This multi-part evening opens with a viewing of the first iteration of Maya Marshak’s work Vision Fields. Produced during her residency, this mural, comprised of painting and moving image projection, is an outcome of her research in South Africa and the UK around lost agroecological knowledges.

Following the viewing, I will deliver a lecture titled Down the Wrong Way: Toward an Environmental History of Cuisine, considering the idea of culinary extinction through the ways recipes map how cultures eat and adapt to the worlds around them.

Responding to the themes of environmental and culinary ghosts explored in our work, David Bates will then present and share with guests a series of home-baked sourdough breads, each made from a different type of wheat. To bring the event to a close, I will offer a “mock mock turtle soup,” as featured in my lecture.

To book a seat and for further information, see here.

Polyphonic Bodies II

It is a great joy that I will return to London in December for the final month of Season 5 of Delfina Foundation’s Politics of Food programme. And it is even more of a joy to collaborate with Delfina resident & Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow Erin Li and chef SongSoo Kim on an event at Asymmetry Art Foundation on Sunday 10 December.

Playing with forms of hospitality and co-existence, this communal tasting aims to nurture a curious yet welcoming social situation that breaks down the boundaries and conventions of the collective meal – which is to say a script of courses, a hierarchy of seating, and a repertoire of flavours organised according to national allegiances.

Polyphonic Bodies II instead serves an edible landscape and invites visitors to graze, “forage”, and freely combine bites, the process of which catalyses connections and conversations related to biodiversity, cultural plurality, the climate crisis, and the generosity of the bacteria that choreographs good health and pleasure.

Tickets are free and available here. This curated tasting is in dialogue with Erin Li’s Polyphonic Bodies “Gallery Takeover” at Whitechapel on 1 December.

Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide

What does Venice look like when observed from the perspective of climate change, environmental collapse, and human-animal relations in an age of industrialization and mass extinction? That is, as a privileged observatory of the Anthropocene?

Published by wetlands and edited by Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani, and Pietro Omodeo, this guidebook is intended as a tool for learning about the city in a new way. Venice emerges here as a unique ecosystem at risk, but also as a key to understanding our increasingly vulnerable world.

What stories of extinction lie behind local delicacies like baccalà mantecato? It was a pleasure to pose this question in the chapter “Baccalà in Venice, Cod in the World.”

The book is available, as of today, in both English and Italian editions.

Salt Stains: The Delfina Sessions

Initiated in January 2021, The Delfina Sessions is Delfina Foundation’s show on Radio Alhara, featuring sets from alumni as well as guest contributors across the world.

The shows are broadcast live from Bethlehem on the third Tuesday of every month at 6pm local time (4pm UK time and 5pm CET). Today kicks off the first session of a three part series spotlighting season 5 of The Politics of Food and it is a honour that my essay “Salt Stains: Appetites and Extinction” will start things off. Listen live today or on Delfina Foundation’s website.

Where is the Planetary?

How could collaboration maintain a habitable planet? What concepts of the world underlie political and social approaches to a transforming Earth system? How can a variety of worldviews be transformed into shared planetary-scale practices that could address the current challenges?

A gathering hosted by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in collaboration with the artist Koki Tanaka, Where is the Planetary? is a collective search for models of living together on Earth. Following five central questions, researchers, artists, and activists seek ways to transform the multitude of perspectives and cosmologies into a common agency.

This week I am excited to participate in Episode 1, which asks: What are the conditions for habitability?

Where is the Planetary? is a three-day event, running from 14 to 16 October. Find out more and browse the event schedule here.

Throughlines: Anthropocene Curriculum

Which legacies—material, geological, biological, and social—have come to form the Anthropocene? What will the legacy of the Anthropocene be? What lines or connections can be traced through the entangled web of agencies and interactions that characterize the Anthropocene?

In answer to these questions, I had the pleasure of curating a course for the Anthropocene Curriculum. Part of Course 6, titled “Thoroughlines,” my pathway explores domestic practices of care—cooking and cleaning—as a throughline to a better future.

It was a delight to contribute to this project and to pen a key contribution. My essay ”Moths, Flames, and Other Attractions” takes a moth-eaten dress as a starting point for a meditation on eating and care. Weaving together critical food studies, personal anecdote, nonhuman perspectives, and story-telling, it thinks about how modes of consumption connect us with other beings and the planet, as well as to the past and the future.

KWI Essen International Fellowship

I am thrilled to be joining KWI Essen as an international fellow in October 2022. The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany, is an interdisciplinary research centre. The reflection of cultural studies is at the center of its work: What can it mean today to do cultural studies between disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily organized knowledge formations? What expectations and requirements regarding relevance and sense-making are they confronted with? How are their forms of criticism and comment defined; their routines of reading and writing, showing, telling and arguing?

It is a treat to be in such inspiring and accomplished company. Read more about the fifth cohort of KWI international fellows here.

A Cuisine of its Own: Food History Seminar at IHR London

Launched at the Institute of Historical Research in summer 2017, the Food History Seminar provides an inclusive setting in which food historians, academics, and experts working in related fields can come together to discuss their research.

The 2022 Autumn Term begins next week and I am delighted to be giving the first talk, titled “A Cuisine of its Own: Culinary Colonialism in Canada.”

What is Canadian cuisine and how does it differ from Indigenous fare? Early settlers in the lands now known as Canada were initially dependent on Indigenous foodways, only then to replace them with European flora and fauna, the likes of wheat, cows, and pigs. But later, when the country chiselled out an identity of its own—one distinct from Britain—, Canadian visual imagery drew from and reimagined Indigenous motifs. Then, on the occasion of Canada’s centennial, as celebrated by Montreal’s Expo 67, La Toundra—the host country’s official restaurant—claimed Indigenous ingredients as Canadian. Providing an overview of this entangled history, this talk will draw from my book project Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada.

Please join me on Zoom Thursday 6 October at 5:30 pm (BST). More details are available here. The talk is free for all to attend, but advanced booking is required.

"Sad Ol Mush": Childhood in the Past

How does breakfast connect to larger conflicts over land and power? And what role does children’s culture play in this?

After having organized the conference Food and/in Children’s Culture: National, International and Transnational Perspectives, literary scholars Anna Gasperini and Laura Tossi have kept the conversation going by curating a special issue of Childhood in the Past. It is a pleasure to have been a part of this project and to have contributed the article “‘Sad Ol Mush’: The Poetics and Politics of Porridge in Residential Schools in Canada.”

My article has just been published. Browse and read the rest of the special issue “Childhood and Food: Literary-Historical Perspectives (c. 19-20th centuries) here.

The Politics of Food

Based in London, Delfina Foundation introduced its thematic programme The Politics of Food in 2014. Since then it has hosted four seasons, which have focused on themes such as sex, diet, and disaster; adapting; and markets and movement.

Autumn 2022 marks the programme’s fifth season and it turns its attention to the climate emergency. I most excited to be participating as one of its residents. During my month in London, I will be exploring culinary substitutions, their practices, discourses, and politics. Read more about my upcoming residency and the excellent company I look forward to collaborating with.

Labrador Current Foodways Residency

It is an absolute honour to share that I have been awarded a Labrador Current Foodways Residency at Fogo Island Arts. Rooted in Fogo Island’s unique geography, the residency explores the interconnectedness of food with our histories, ecologies, economies, politics and social worlds. I cannot wait to follow the cod to Fogo, Newfoundland, in 2023!

Read the announcement to learn more about the residency and the inspiring practitioners that I am lucky to be in the company of: Marta Arzak, Cooking Sections, Taus Makhacheva, and Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa.