Stories
From Fusion Food to Borderless Cuisine: Taian Table in Shanghai
“Global food” has a bad ring to it. We inevitably think of industrialized, delocalized products without roots in any specific culinary tradition. It is the convenient, accessible, and affordable stuff we may find in any supermarket or corner store around the world:...
Everybody Come to the Table: Italian Cuisine as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
What is Italian cuisine? What kind of national identity does it reflect, considering that Italians are famously attached to their local and regional culinary traditions? These are the central questions that food historian Massimo Montanari and comparative law...
Food in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17: The Circular Economy as Dystopia
Bong Joon-ho's use of food, eating, and dystopic food systems to develop his arguments has not garnered the attention it deserves. Which is quite strange, as those elements are in your face, all the time, like in his last film Mickey 17. Class stratification and...
Eating Pets and Bomb Threats: How Weaponizing Food Helps Trump Win Votes
Maria Contreras illustration for Foreign Policy The dinner table unites and divides, especially the question of what we eat and how we eat it. It is therefore not surprising that politicians frequently use food as a wedge issue to push their ideological agendas and...
Fascism, food, and women: totalitarism at the table
This is a draft of my review of Diana Garvin's book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, published on the journal MLN. Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves has marked world cinema with its raw representations of post-World War II poverty in...
The Makaron Case: Pasta, Poland, and Politics
Italian pasta has suddenly become very hot in Polish politics (ok, terrible pun, but bear with me…). On Wednesday October 3rd, Janusz Kowalski, the deputy minister for Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland, posted an infographic on his X account in which he...