Reading an article about international affairs today, I was stopped short by an interesting, food-focused turn of phrase. John Wolfsthal, a former senior program director at the National Security Council under Barak Obama explained, “We don’t know what Kim Jong-un has for breakfast, so how can we know what his real end game is? We just… Continue reading Breakfast of Dictators

I was very happy that the New York Times decided to publish a write-up of my new book and even more happy that it was in company with two other books that tackle the complexities of how we define and think about Southern food. As Americans think hard about what cultural appropriation is and how it… Continue reading Food on the Page in the New York Times

I’m back from a great few days at the annual ASFS conference in Scarborough, Canada. That’s the Association for the Study of Food and Society, a group of food studies scholars from all over the world. We come from many academic disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences and lean towards the analytical and… Continue reading The abominable delicious

Radio host Brian Lehrer of WNYC invited the Sporkful’s host, Dan Pashman onto his show today to riff on the Slate article about Allrecipes that inspired my last post. While Pashman seemed more inclined to use the recipes to understand divisions in class cultures, Lehrer stuck with the always crowd-pleasing “Ew, I can’t believe people… Continue reading Have it Your Way, Part II

Allrecipes is an amazing resource for many things. There are the recipes, of course, but it is also a fantastic portrait of what people are eating and how they are thinking about the joys and challenges of daily cooking. The author of a recent article in Slate declares it “perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of… Continue reading Have it Your Way

Discovering that shopping lists are as old as the Bible jogged my memory about a collection of found shopping lists, posted online. I can imagine the grocery lists collection as a great place to find ideas for poetry or fiction. Maybe even some ideas for dinner. For a historian, though, the collection is tantalizing because it isn’t searchable… Continue reading Last of the lists?

The UK supermarket giant Tesco has announced it will start selling “wonky” vegetables as “perfectly imperfect” in an effort to reduce food waste. I think they might have better luck if they just piled up a bunch of odd looking parsnips and potatoes (that’s what they are starting with) and labeled them “Traditional.” It has interested… Continue reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, Greengrocer

A recent article about using instagram to study nutrition in areas designated “food deserts,” published in the Atlantic raised many interesting issues and opportunities for food scholars. For me, the most interesting element of this study is not the nutritional quality of the food depicted, but the strong argument that these images make against the very concept of the… Continue reading Picture This

Reading an article about a new high tech juice business in the New York Times, I was reminded of the warnings that regularly circulate among the food-interested that either nutritionists or food scientists will soon have all the rest of us consuming nothing but pellets for our meals. The fear is that food will be engineered… Continue reading Texture and Technology