Stories
Savoring Words: How Can We Write about Food?
As a journalist earlier and a scholar later, I have been reflecting about how to best write about food, especially when I am not developing arguments or explaining facts. How can words convey the sensory or emotional elements that shape our eating experiences and...
Gastropopulism: food and identity politics
Central to citizens’ physical survival and social identity, food can play a central in role in politics, the organized effort to define, manage, and determine goals for communities at all scales. Ingredient, dishes, and eating customs may end up becoming tools - or...
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite: Food and Inequality
Irony and a keen sense of the absurdity of contemporary consumer society allow Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the global hit film Parasite, to deal with surreal plot lines while emphasizing the tangible elements of everyday life - including food - as...
The Mediterranean Diet between Heritage and Design
Having grown up in Rome, Italy, it is always nice to find myself in a place where the smells, the colors, and the flavors of the food remind me somehow of my own culinary background. In particular, tomatoes are a marker of home. Plump, tasty, aromatic, they were a...
From Bread Lines to Pea Soup: Notes on Food and Politics in Socialist Poland
Squarely at the center of conversations and controversies about what Poland is and should be in the future, food has great political value due to the nation's recent past as a socialist country in the USSR sphere of influence, its post-socialist transformation, and...
Building community in a Shanghai neighborhood garden
China is still in flux, a complex country with layers and layers of history and stories. In any metropolis, upscale real estate and old buildings coexist. Affluent citizens may live in proximity of rural migrants, while ignoring their existence. A community garden in...