Currently browsing posts about: Food-culture

Anya Von Bremzen. History, and the Meaning of Home. Penguin, 2023.

I can never get over how many superb books are now published on food themes, on after another.

Consider—and you definitely should—this one, for example.

For starters, there’s the fabulous cover by Roz Chast, no less (I want one for my next book!).

For another, there’s its brilliant structure and what Von Bremzen does with it.  She is a cookbook author, best known to me for her memoir, Masterian the Art of Soviet Cooking, an account of what food was like for a child growing up in Moscow in the former Soviet Union.

National Dish uses what are assumed to be foods representing entire cultures to reflect on the meaning of food for personal identity and larger issues of gastronationalism.  Von Bremzen spent at least a month in each country examining how its particular dish did and did not represent the culture of Japan (Ramen noodles), France (Pot-au-Feu), Spain (tapas), and Mexico (mole), and others, necessarily ending with the most poignant, Ukraine (borsch).

Von Bremzen is great company on these explorations, delving into language, history, anthropology, and whatever else it takes to understsand the role of that particular food in that particular society.  A couple of excerpts:

Neopolitans were not Italy’s original mangiamaccheroni, however; the Sicilians were.  A twelfth-century Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi, was first to report that people near Palermo were making strings of dough called itriyya–-from the Arabic? Greek?  Hebrew?—which they traded “by the shipload” to Calabria and “other Christian lands.”  The Neopolitans?  They were called mangiofoglie (leaf eaters), or, more quaintly, cacafoglie (leaf shitters) for their massive intake of dark leafy greens—a forerunner of the Brooklyn dream diet.  (p. 52)

This, on “washoku—fuzzily defined as “the traditionally dietary cultures of the Japanese” and modeled on the equally fuzzy but successful “gastronomic meal of the French.”

But it was the UNESCO listing that produced a washoku explosion.  A word only faintly known before to the Japanese public was now everywhere, celebrated in cookbooks, media articles, gastronomic guides, and scholarly studies.  And the government—mixing bunka gaikō (cultural diplomacy and Brand Japan building—promoted washoku abroad as the nation’s ancient and healthy tradition.  An upscale pizza effect swung into action.  International recognition boosted washoku’s domestic cachet, swelling the pride that Japanest home cooks now took, according to polls, in their own intangible food heritage.

Intangible indeed. (p.103)

This is one terrific book, erudite but fun to read and a great contribution to the literature of food studies.  Enjoy!

• Here’s the New York Times review.
• And an interview in Saveur

Fabio Parasecoli.  Gastronativism: Food, Politics and Globalization.  Columbia University Press, 2021.  (226 pages)

My NYU colleague, Fabio Parasecoli, has just published this one.  I blurbed it:

Fabio Parasecoli draws on his deep international experience in this thoughtful analysis of how food gets ensnared in political ideology to separate “us” from “them.”  Gastronativism argues convincingly that food systems are indeed global, and the sooner we get those systems to bring people together, the better.

A few excerpts:

On the connection between gastronativism and populism:

Not by chance, some of most infamous manifestations of gastronativism have appeared in countries where these leaders operate.  Food is able to activate emotions and does not require much mediation; it is shared by everybody, everybody experiences it, everybody is an expert.  Gastronativism interprets people’s tangible experiences and frustrations as consequences of all-powerful, stealthy, and ruthless global dynamics, and it often does it through the language of victimization and suffrance.  Gastronativism provides a sense of rootedness, comfort, and security against the globalization. (p. 15)

On how gastronativism fosters a sense of community:

Instability has made the desire for community and rootedness more urgent, for good and for bad.  Food, as an expression of individual and shared identities, constitutes the perfect vehicle to make such aspirations tangible.  As such, the passions it elicits are ripe to be channeled ideologically.  Ideas of locality, nation, tradition, heritage, and authenticity have been activated in political projects operating at movements that range from anarchic anti-globalism to various forms of populism, nationalism, and sovranism, tainted at times with racism and xenophobia.

On gastronativism as a representation of “us” vs. “them”:

A deeper awareness of the political, non-neutral quality of all processes defining food traditions and the quest for authenticity can provide a better grasp of the dynamics that allow dishes, products, or customs to be experienced as “local” or “ours.” Understanding their emergence and changes over time and space would not diminish their emotional power, but it could blunt their exploitation by belligerent political actors. Appreciation and pride in one’s culinary world should not necessary imply debasing the food of the others… By chipping away at ideas of an ageless, essential “us,” greater awareness of the possible destructive impulses of gastronativist motivations and strategies could generate more openness toward “them,” whoever they may be.

Today, we celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery ended in Texas.

Here’s a quick introduction to the food traditions, courtesy of the food historian Michael Twitty and Oprah Winfrey.

If you want to dig deeper, there is plenty to work with.  For starters:

And anything by Michael Twitty is worth reading.

I’ve been collecting intriguing items about new foods and supplements, soon to be at a supermarket near you.

• Waffle House teams up with Georgia’s Oconee Brewing Company to produce a bacon-flavored beer:  Bacon and beer is a match made in heaven. Bacon beer, on the other hand, could be something even better.  Waffle House, the iconic restaurant chain, has teamed up with Georgia-based brewery Oconee Brewing Company to offer the first Waffle House-branded beer called Bacon & Kegs.
• A Gluten Free Oreo Is Finally Hitting Grocery Store Shelves in January.  I know you’ve been waiting for this.
• New Heat-Resistant Spirulina for Hard Candy.  Meet FruitMax^® Blue 1506, a unique spirulina-based liquid formulation designed for coloring hard candy and lozenges blue (patent pending) from natural sources. More robust and efficient compared to standard liquid spirulina products. It is heat and acid stable and doesn’t produce unwanted spots or cloudiness or lose its ability to color when in the challenging processing steps. It protects the color the instant it hits the very hot candy mass.
• Meat-Tech 3D expands cultured meat with printed tissue and acquisition: The publicly traded company based in Israel has its eyes on bringing technology to make 3D-printed cell-based meat available to the world as quickly as possible.
• PepsiCo launches sleep-aid drink Driftwell: The enhanced water, which will be sold first online starting in December, is designed to help stressed consumers relax and unwind before bed.
• Research method turns pig blood into protein powder for supplement use:  Researchers have released details of an intriguing new method to convert pig blood into a powder with 90% protein content that can be used as a supplement in a variety of foods…. Read more 
• Fermented pig placenta intake reduces fatigue by regulating inflammatory responses – LG Household & Health study:  An RCT [randomized controlled trial] involving healthy adults showed that the supplementation of fermented porcine (pig) placental extract could improve fatigue-related parameters…. Read more
• Ukraine is trying to reclaim Borscht, its famous beet soup that’s often attributed to Russian cuisine. The Eastern European country plans to ask the U.N.’s cultural body to list Borscht as part of its cultural heritage, The New York Times reports.

Jessica Harris. Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of Their Work and the Joy of Their Play.  University of Mississippi Press, 2020.

I reviewed this book for Food, Culture, and Society, which published my review online on July 23, 2020.  It won’t appear in print until November 2021.  Emily Contois, the fabulous book review editor, is way ahead.

Here’s what I said about it.

Some years ago, I was in Woods Hole and hopped on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard to visit Jessica Harris at her cottage in the historic African-American community at Oak Bluffs. I knew her as the distinguished culinary historian, cookbook author, and scholar of the African food diaspora. In the early years of NYU’s food studies program, she taught brilliant courses on food and culture that I sat in on whenever I could. She is now retired from a long teaching career at Queens College.

During that Oak Bluffs visit, Harris showed me boxes packed with old postcards depicting Africans – and their descendants throughout the world – growing, carrying, preparing, and eating food. I couldn’t stop looking at them, and I’ve never stopped wondering what happened to them. This book is the answer, and a perfect fit with the University of Mississippi’s series on Atlantic Migration and the African Diaspora, which Harris edits.

In addition to her other accomplishments, Harris is a passionate deltiologist, a term new to my vocabulary meaning one who collects – and sometimes studies – postcards, which Harris had been doing for fifty years. She begins the book with three short essays – a description of when, how, and where she amassed her collection; a discussion of what can be learned from postcards and the kinds of questions that need to be asked about them (illustrated with about 25 examples); and a history of the introduction and use of postcards from the 1870s on. She also includes guidelines on how to estimate a postcard’s date (not easy).

But most of the book is devoted to 168 color illustrations of postcards from her collection, almost all from the early 1900s. These illustrate people at work and play from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States in three categories: farm, garden, and sea; marketplace, venders, cooks; and leisure, entertainments, and festivities. Their captions repeat information printed on the front, state whatever is printed or written on the back, and, if the card is stamped, give the date it was mailed. For example, a photograph of a Caribbean sugar warehouse (which reminded me of Kara Walker’s magnificent 2014 “sugar baby” sculpture in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory), is captioned: “Stacking Bags of Raw Sugar. Back: Post Card British Manufacture. Printed for the Imperial Institute by McCorquodale & Co. Ltd. London. A Red Bromide Photograph. (Divided Back.)” (84).

That’s it. Unless the card has this information, the captions say nothing about who took the picture, where, and in what year, who is depicted, its context, its purpose, or whether it was taken in a studio. In her introductory essay, “”Interrogating the Images,” Harris says “I am not a postcard scholar” (19). She collected and selected the cards for their illustration of culinary or cultural history and colonial exploitation, but also for their beauty, curiosity, or inscrutability. If you want to know more, it’s up to you to find that out and develop your own interpretation.

Despite that protestation, Harris cannot avoid taking a scholar’s approach. She points out the colonial attitudes expressed in the images or their titles–“elegant banana seller” (30), or the bare-breasted women selling foods at a “native” market in Dakar that looks like something out of the early years of National Geographic. This market could not possibly be in Dakar, Harris notes, Senegal is a Muslim country, where women did not appear in public unclothed.

In this era of #BlackLivesMatter, it is uncomfortable to look at images of picturesque poverty or colonial exploitation: “Blacks in a Moorish café” (68), “Zulus at Mealtime” (69), or even “Water coconut vendor” (97) are depicted as exotics. Given its racist history, the United States postcards are particularly problematic: “Polly in the Peanut Patch” (110), “Negro Vegetable Vendor” (123), “Old/Southern Kitchen and Negro Manny” (130) should and do make us squirm. It’s hard to view “Food for contention” (135) as just a charming photograph of a little girl reaching for her brother’s watermelon slice if such images weren’t so fraught with racist meanings.

Each of these images has a story behind it that calls for analysis by food studies scholars. Harris’s Vintage Postcards should inspire all of us to become avid deltiologists.

I am indebted to DairyReporter.com for this item, which especially interested me because one set of my grandparents immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in the very early 1900s.  Perhaps this explains why I like ice cream so much.

The item:”12 bizarre ice cream flavors from Lithuania.”

It seems plain vanilla ice cream might soon be out of fashion in Lithuania, where chefs are experimenting with natural flavors, including plenty not normally associated with ice cream.”

He’s not kidding.  Try these:

• • Pine needle
  • Peony
  • Carrot
  • Rhubarb
  • Beetroot
  • Lavender
  • Quark and nettle ice cream (I had to look up quark.  No, not a subatomic particle: a curd-type cheese).
  • Linden honey and dill
  • Seaweed and caviar
  • Spinach and tarragon
  • Beer

• Smoked mackerel

This comes from ©Bill Wurtzel’s “Food For Thought about COVID-19.”

And a reader, Harvey Carroll, forwards this (original source unknown):

One of my favorite chefs, Mark Strausman, has posted instructions for a virtual passover.  Here, for example, is his video for do-it-yourself matzo.

Dayenu!

John Germov & Lauren Williams, eds. A Sociology of Food & Nutrition: The Social Appetite, 4th ed.  Oxford University Press, 2017.

I know about this book mainly because my NYU colleague Marie Bragg and I have a chapter in it, “The politics of government dietary advice: the influence of Big Food.”

The book is meant to introduce readers to the field of food sociology through themes.  It divides chapters by various authors into three sections: the social appetite, the food system, and food culture.

Its aim is

to make the sociological study of food relevant to a multidisciplinary readership, particularly those across health, nutrition, and social science disciplines.  Our further aim is to reach a broad readership so that those interested in food, nutrition, and wider issues of food production, distribution, and consumption can discover the relevance of studying the social context of food.

The chapters plunge into the controversies and come with summaries of the main points, sociological reflections, discussion questions, and ideas for further investigation.

The sociological reflection on Marie’s and my chapter says:

Dietary guidelines and food guides, although apparently “science-based,” are created by individuals who serve on government committees and are subject to the same kinds of influences as any other members of society.  Because the food industry is the sector of society with the strongest stake in the outcome of dietary guidance, government agencies and committee members are strongly lobbied by industry.  Controversy over dietary advice derives from the contradiction between the health-promoting goals of public health and the profit-making goals of food companies.

If you are looking for a quick introduction to food sociology, here’s a place to begin.  The editors are Australian academics so there are plenty of Australian examples.