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This study examines the culinary entrepreneurship of Korean American 'returnees' in Seoul's food and beverage industry, paying special attention to the identitarian and meaning-making impetuses and consequences that emerge in the production of Asian American food in Seoul. Utilizing in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this study finds that 'returnees' emphasize their 'cosmopolitan Koreanness' in marketing their ventures and products and in explaining the relative success of Korean American entrepreneurs in Seoul. We conclude by exploring how the culinary entrepreneurship of Korean American 'returnees' in South Korea both add to and complicate contemporary understandings of Asian American identity, entrepreneurship, and foodways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore food as a vital cultural artifact to gain a glimpse into its pervasive fertility in the world of music. By conducting a qualitative textual analysis, we examine the potency of food in the quotidian practices of commensality that characterize the eccentric ways in which Hindustani music practitioners organize and transmit musical knowledge. We emphasize the analogies drawn by musicians of the Hindustani tradition featured in Sheila Dhar's autobiographical Raga'n Josh and Namita Devidayal's memoirs The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan and The Music Room. Exploring the analogical richness of food, we uncover the entanglements between the musical and the culinary, highlighting how food serves as a mnemonic vehicle, shaping the lifeworlds of these musicians. While Western music has seen extensive scholarship on food-related interventions, South Asian perspectives, particularly in the realm of Hindustani music, remain largely underexplored. In this study, we address that gap, demonstrating how food operates not just as sustenance but as a medium of cultural memory, identity, and transmission. By foregrounding intersections of identity-based experience, we utilize an interdisciplinary lens to illuminate the deeply intertwined roles of food and music in constructing and preserving the collective ways of seeing developed over time by Hindustani music performers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant cultures of consumption mostly exist as anomalies within the neoliberal food system of America, which functions through the superfluity of mass-produced, branded food and through the systemic obscurity of migrant microcultural flavors. The play of presences and absences of specific tastes has sociocultural implications in embodying the migrant as “minority.” Taking up specific instances of gustatory transactions between South Asians and Americans, this essay will examine the gastro-politics of migrant South Asian identity in America, and the issues of discrimination and racism that are revealed in such transactions.

Drawing on life-story interviews and ethnography conducted in Israel from 2009 to 2023, this article examines how members of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan–Jewish diaspora in Israel recalled their habits of eating non-kosher food in Morocco. We explore how these memories emerged in response to commonplace discourses that depict Moroccan Jews as a distinctly religious-traditional ethnic group, untouched by European secular influences, and dichotomous to modern secular cultures in Israel. Contrary to this image, members of the community whom we interviewed highlighted a Jewish Moroccan life that was deeply connected to Spanish colonialism and the broader Hispanic and Sephardi worlds. We focus specifically on the concept of selkear, a Haketia (Judeo-Spanish) term meaning to let something go, make an exception, or turn a blind eye. Our analysis of our participants' memories provides a nuanced understanding of Jewish religiosity in the context of colonialism and of how Mizrahi–Sephardi immigrants in Israel reclaimed their Judaism. Highlighting the practice of eating non-kosher food is thus a strategy used to challenge dominant notions of rigid religious commitment within the Sephardi diaspora and their interpretation in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study illustrates how incarcerated Latinx people create alternative social worlds or queer worldmakings as they negotiate everyday life in prison. I explore how these queer Latinx worldmakings are created and lived through the formation of chosen families or familias and the organizing of family dinners. Latinx queer worldmakings are temporary productions of social worlds that facilitate navigating life in the present while being queer and Latinx to resist as well as reconfigure disciplining heteronormative and white supremacist processes. It is the process of performing and creating a present that is oriented towards the future. I argue that such queer Latinx worldmakings counter white heteronormative social-spatial norms and carcerality, while also providing important lessons on what it means to live, love, and make place in and beyond the prison. The Latinx incarcerated women participants queered prison life by engaging in informal economies, negotiating relationships with correction officers, and securing ingredients for family dinners. By using an autoethnographic/testimonio approach and conversations with an incarcerated family member and friends, I explore two ways Latinx queer worldmakings are enacted: the creation of chosen families, and the organizing of family dinners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Kristian Levring's 2000 film The King is Alive from a radically open historicist methodology, analysing the film as a product of multiple interleaved archives. An adaptation of King Lear , the film's relevant archive includes documents from the English Renaissance like the early modern recipe books and seventeenth-century medical treatises that this article uncovers. Yet because The King is Alive was filmed in an abandoned German mining colony in the Namib desert, the archive must also include accounts of the colonialist 'Scramble for Africa' more than two centuries after King Lear was written. The methodological deftness of history-as-adaptation allows us to see the film's anxieties about food that rest at the nexus of these two archives. Shakespeare's play worries about liminal foods—species-specific foods, foods that fail to nourish, and foods that become poison—but the film updates these concerns to implicate Western imperialism and global capitalism. Surrounded (and, in one instance, killed) by potentially botulistic cans of carrots that remain after the German occupation, the characters in the film must grapple with the toxic leftovers of colonialism, including Shakespeare's playtext. The film thus asks its audience to consider further archives related to the imperialist roots of the invention of canning, the discovery of vitamins, and the export of Shakespeare as a 'civilizing' figure. Finally, the film gestures to the foodway challenges exacerbated by both capitalism and climate change, becoming a palimpsest of archives from across multiple temporalities: a Shakespearean past, a colonialist present, and a warming future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early nineteenth century, Jewish cookbooks appeared on the Central European book market for the first time. So far, these manuals have been studied primarily from the perspective of the preservation of Jewish identity, that is, as a marker of the extent to which kashrut could be preserved in the face of increasing acculturation to non-Jewish society. Little attention was paid to aspects of transfer or entanglement between Jewish and non-Jewish foodways despite the central role of food in everyday life. In my paper, I try to map possible encounters between Jews and Christians in the area of food preparation and eating outside one's home before analyzing several Jewish and general cookbooks appearing in the Habsburg Monarchy and Imperial Germany. The fact that also non-Jewish cooking manuals integrated dishes perceived as Jewish indicates mutual influence and makes it evident that there was more Christian interest in Jewish foodways than assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of Ibn al-Durayhim al-Mawsilī's fourteenth-century compilation Kitaīb Manaīfiʻ al-Ḥayawaīn (Book of Animal Uses) demonstrates the magical uses of olive oil for the enhancement or impediment of sex when combined with certain animal by-products. These uses mirror similar details in other Mediterranean treatises on agriculture, food, magic, medicine, poetry, or religion, whether produced in the Abbasid Caliphate or al-Andalus. Olive oil was not necessarily the item that made certain dishes or objects magical, but rather it was a necessary binding medium that allowed the resulting products to enchant. Beyond this, olive oil as a liquid ingredient also serves as a metaphor for understanding the malleable and adaptable Mediterranean nature of those who used and consumed it. This approach allows contemporary scholars to uncover a richer understanding of the fluid and shifting Mediterranean cultural identity especially considering the manuscript's varied provenance across the Sea throughout the centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To save food for winter, domestic preserve makers in contemporary Bulgaria employ a variety of microbe management techniques including fermentation, sterilization, drying, and cold storage. This diversity is built upon micro and macro biocultural refugia significantly influenced by everyday life during state socialism, that persisted in the early post-socialist period and after European Union integration. I analyze microbial management techniques as social practices arguing they are manifestations of quiet food sovereignty. The resulting home-preserved foods are prized as clean, tasty, and reliable. They complement industrial foods in everyday life. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2018-2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asados, Argentine cook-outs or barbecues, to this day have a prestigious reputation within Argentine identity often due to its lasting association with the Gauchos—rural Argentine cowboys—who flourished in the nineteenth century shortly after the country's independence from Spain. However, what is less known is how this quintessential dish, especially the well-done slow-cooked nature of the meat, is a rarely explored window to the past. I stipulate that the transatlantic, transcultural, and even transtemporal importance of this dish preserved by the Gauchos since the nineteenth century places them and their descendants as the hidden heirs of clandestine Moriscos—mostly crypto-Muslims forcedly converted to Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula—who settled in the least monitored area of Spain's American colonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moriscos knew how to mask certain actions while still holding strong to some former cultural and culinary practices. So too did the Gauchos as they were originally coined rebellious outlaws who did not want to fully conform and assimilate to the dominant culture. Perhaps in viewing their shared cooking styles we can see the often ignored history of Andalusi influence via Morisco practices in the Southern Cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Le Rideau levé, ou L'Éducation de Laure (1786), Mirabeau's heroine describes the erotic, philosophical and scientific education she receives from her stepfather, in which she learns how to manage her sexual appetites and her bodily hygiene and learns the ethics and practical application of erotic pleasure. One of the principles her father claims underpin her education is that of respecting others' autonomy and treating them as one would like to be treated. Yet a symbolic and historicized reading of drinking within the text, exploring key scenes through the bottom of the glass, reveals that Laure's libertine chemist father uses apparently benign social rituals and staged pleasure to manipulate others from the inside out. Far from being radical, by overriding others' autonomy Laure's father cultivates an educational project rooted in cruelty and traditional, patriarchal hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the interplay of race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Argentina when major forces such as immigration, urbanisation, and modernisation reshaped women's work both in the factory and the home. My analysis focuses on Mil fórmulas de cocina "La Negra", a cookbook published between 1917 and 1940 by the meatpacking plant Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, which features photographs from the factory and its workers in between the recipes. First, I refer to the history of the meatpacking plant and its modernisation campaign. I compare the case of "La Negra" to other stereotypes of Blackness in branding in order to explore the relationship between the company's industrial project and the figure of the Afro-Argentine woman. Second, I examine the cookbook's texts and images by tracing a parallel between the meatpacking plant's female workers and the middle-class homemakers who buy and read these cookbooks. In so doing, I argue that La Negra's cookbooks were a crucial instrument in reinforcing an ideology of domesticity that linked national progress to whiteness and middle-class identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiential learning in food and agricultural higher education takes many different forms. This paper highlights an immersive, comparative approach to a graduate food studies course in the dairy sector. It explores how students in this class experience a particular combination of field trips, culinary workshops, hands-on activities, and classroom discussions, and explores how the structure and combination of these course elements contributes to reflection, critical thought, and a more nuanced and complex understanding of food systems (or not). Results suggest that this intensive compare/contrast approach to field trips and applied experiences, accompanied by multiple venues for in-depth verbal and written reflection on these experiences, can help facilitate (1) self-reflection, critical thinking, and broader systems thinking, (2) an understanding of and empathy towards conflicting views on food systems issues, and (3) an acceptance of and ability to work across differences, within the contradictions and complications that characterize food systems work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shot in Catalan with non-professional actors and halfway between fiction and non-fiction, Alcarràs (2022) delves into the extinction of small-scale farmers. Throughout the film, we are confronted with different representations of the dispossession experienced by three generations. This article aims to interpret Alcarràs and its poetic of extinction from the theoretical perspective of food studies, paying special attention to the analysis of the script. Indeed, to narrate the drama of a family of farmers expropriated in the era of neoliberalism, Simón uses a series of framed stories: family memories, feudal legends, and songs that the grandparents' generation passes down to the grandchildren. These are stories of oppression and solidarity linked to food, revolving around who feeds whom and who eats whom. The concept of foodscape is useful for interpreting the portrayal of a gastronomic, cultural, and linguistic ecosystem in which territory, tradition, and language are threatened by supposedly green technology.

Bread and margarine with wine, or “tea-and-two-slices”, presents a choice that triggers vast contemplations on poverty versus wealth and meaningful versus meaningless life. This paper aims to highlight how George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London tackles the centrality of food and the people striving to obtain it. The purpose of this reading is to raise contemporary readers’ awareness of the inequality between the effort to procure food and the meagre outcomes, portrayed through a symphony of smells, a shocking juxtaposition of food abundance and scarcity, and a conflict of states needing interpretation. Orwell sets the two capitals in a mirroring progression where reflections magnify or diminish depending on people’s involvement in solving the constant dilemma of survival. While Paris offers the poor a chance to look for work, London reduces the struggle to mere begging for food, which is officially banned. The layered perspective brings the reader to a stark realization: a heavenly meal in a Parisian restaurant may have been prepared in “the hell of” a kitchen. In London, reality unfolds on a horizontal plane, where charities providing food deprive the poor of the chance to work for it. The contexts differ, but the props remain the same: filth, famine and an abundance of feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since J. Alfred Prufrock asked the question “Do I dare to eat the peach?”, T.S. Eliot’s poems, essays and plays have provided food for thought for generations over the past century. Literary critics, historians and scholars of cultural modernity have occasionally noted the poet’s interest in depicting and commenting on how modern individuals perceive sources of nourishment, their transformative power and the consequences of their absence. This paper draws on previous studies of his work to explore and highlight the representation of fruits, fruition and fruitlessness in several of his poems. It also reconsiders earlier interpretations, shedding light on missing aspects and bringing attention to new insights into poems from his earliest to his last collections. The analysis employs several interpretive techniques, including symbolic analysis to uncover how fruit imagery in Eliot’s work reflects themes of existential questioning, spiritual emptiness and societal critique. It situates this symbolism within the broader modernist exploration of alienation and renewal. Additionally, the study assesses Eliot’s literary influences, such as European satire and French symbolism, and their impact on his thematic concerns. An ecocritical perspective is also used to examine how Eliot’s portrayal of food and nature engages with early 20th-century ecological and cultural issues, reconsidering materialism and spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This document is a review of the book "An Archive of Taste" by Lauren Klein. The reviewer, Parama Roy, discusses how the book explores the concept of taste in the early United States and its connection to race and eating. The book examines the role of taste in the formation of republican ideals and the exclusion of marginalized groups, particularly enslaved individuals. Roy praises Klein's use of archival research and digital humanities methods to uncover hidden narratives and absences in the historical record. Overall, the review highlights the book's contribution to understanding the complex relationship between taste, race, and power in early America. [Extracted from the article]

En un momento en el que la gastronomía experimenta una gran aceptación en los medios de comunicación y en el que resulta una herramienta de identidad cultural fundamental en el diálogo social y en el desarrollo económico de España, nos preguntamos cómo ha sido abordado este fenómeno desde la investigación en las universidades españolas. Para ello, estudiamos de forma minuciosa las tesis doctorales de las facultades de comunicación, así como los artículos de investigación publicados en las revistas científicas españolas más competitivas y las comunicaciones remitidas al principal congreso español de investigación en comunicación entre 2007 y 2018, periodo abordado desde el proyecto I+D+i “Mapas de la Investigación en Comunicación en las universidades españolas”. Estos datos los ponemos en contexto con las tendencias internacionales de investigación sobre este objeto de estudio, gracias a lo que podemos extraer como conclusión la insuficiente base teórica de los estudios realizados en la academia española. Por este motivo, alentamos la incorporación en la investigación sobre comunicación gastronómica en España de acercamientos interdisciplinarios, como los que caracterizan food studies.

Food is not only a biological need but also a socio-cultural phenomenon. Though food is a vital need for people to survive, it does not only contain taste and ingredients, but contains other things like emotions, symbols of identity, power relations, gender roles, economy and social rules. Food choices affect lots of areas in the society and the life of individuals. This article will analyze the use of food in James Joyce’s Ulysses through its ordinary hero Leopold Bloom. The novel, as the epic of the body, uses food as a reflection of everyday life and grotesque realism. Moreover, food is used throughout the novel to exemplify Bloom’s personal and social identity. Bloom is a pacifist, nontraditionally masculine man, half Irish, half Jewish and also feels like an outsider in Dublin. All these aspects are narrated in Ulysses through the food he chooses to eat. Joyce has created a novel about life with all its aspects, including food.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of post-secondary education turned future planning for online courses into an immediate reality. Given the in-person limitations, courses centred on experiential learning (EL) opportunities were challenging to offer without their curricula undergoing extensive reconsideration. This article highlights how two Italian Studies courses at the University of Toronto (U of T) and University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), known for their in-person EL opportunities and study abroad, were able to provide highly interactive, global learning spaces online through the deployment of digital technologies and inclusion of redesigned high-impact practices (HIPs). What emerged from these new virtual spaces and adjacent components (e.g. virtual lectures, tours, workshops, assessments) were models for the preservation of academic integrity, frequent peer-to-peer interaction, and innovative ways to put learners into direct contact with Italian culture. Drawing from these successes and from current scholarship in teaching and learning, the courses at the centre of this article – Modern Italian Culture (ITA358/9Y0, U of T) and Italian Culture through Food (ITA235H5, UTM) – are presented as case studies which champion the inclusion of digital learning tools, open access and virtual opportunities across humanities curricula, regardless of delivery mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luisa Carnés's novel Tea Rooms: Mujeres obreras (1934) recounts the corporeal and sensory experience of workers in a pastelería, capturing their hunger and fatigue amid the smells of freshly baked pastries. These working women are thus inserted into economic space, defined as the production, distribution, and consumption of the material goods that sustain life and give pleasure. The novel makes palpable their desire to enjoy the consumer products that surround them—whether in the tea room, in nearby shops, or in the cinema across the street—pleasurable goods that remain beyond their means. In the musical comedy El bailarín y el trabajador (1936), a ruined señorito, formerly a ballroom dancer, finds himself relegated to working in a cookie factory. As he redirects his bodily exertion from nonproductive to productive labor, he sings of the working life as "dulce y sabrosa" (sweet and flavorful). Based on a play by Jacinto Benavente (1925), and repurposed in the era of the Popular Front, the film attempts to ease class conflict by celebrating the working life and asserting interclass harmony, thereby appealing to viewers on both the left and right. But despite its bourgeois perspective, the striking shots of the machinery, with the masa (dough) emerging from the cylinders—flattened, stamped, and cut into cookies—clearly suggest the masses in the process of organizing and coming to consciousness. And juxtaposed with these factory scenes are segments showing the glamorous, "sweet" life of the idle rich. Both the novel, with its Marxist critique, and the film, with its bourgeois message, mobilize affects by deploying the material metaphors of foodstuffs—sweets, in this case—that provide not so much sustenance as pleasure. These two works thus foreground in quite different ways the notion of "communal luxury," the right of workers to beauty, to pleasure, and to a life of the mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lively autobiography details Marion Nestle’s life-long engagement with food, particularly the tumultuous politics that inevitably accompany this central aspect of human life. As the founder of the interdiscipline of food studies, she describes her early life in academia, her work with the federal government and her appointment as a professor at New York University (NYU). Food studies scholars and practitioners will be fascinated by her insider stories of creating the field – from acquiring financial backing and finding qualified faculty to attracting students and bringing food influencers onside. To paraphrase Wendell Barry, eating is a political act, and no-one brings that to life more acutely than Marion Nestle.

This article examines the place of food and cooking in Caribbean women's postcolonial writings, and concentrates on the works of two women authors of Caribbean origins: Jean Rhys and Olive Senior. It explores how the representations of cooking and culinary traditions help us to rethink the process of creolization from a feminine perspective. Creolization is a process of cultural encounter and mixing that is central to the understanding of Caribbean identities. However, the theories of creolization have often omitted the role that women play in this process. This article focuses on cooking, an activity usually conceived as feminine and shows how it participates in the opposition to the continuation of racial, social, and sexual domination resulting from colonization. It demonstrates how the two selected authors tackle the topic of cooking, and how they rehabilitate this activity as an art and as a key element in the transmission of creolized cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]