Stories
Vodka and Pierogi: Gastronativism during Putin’s War
In the midst of a war that is reshaping the global geopolitical landscape, food has been co-opted as a symbol-–some may say a tool— to show solidarity, buttress identities, and express hostility or even enmity. Just a couple of days had passed since Putin’s attack on...
(Again) A Plea for Pleasure
I happened to reread the afterword of my 2008 book Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Some of the observations were naive, some were weirdly prescient (al least regarding the present state of the political discourse), others are still on point. This is (again) a Plea...
Food in a Korean Drama: Imagining North Korea in Crash Landing on You
In the Korean drama on Netlix, food is used to portray a fictional North Korea that arguably has not much to share with the real one but whose apparent function is to run a commentary on South Korean consumer culture. A lot has been written on Squid Game, the Korean...
Memories of Flavors: Negotiating the Past in post-Socialist Europe
The fall of the socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe has created winners and losers. Most current political tensions in those countries are rooted in the uneven distribution of the benefits deriving from rapid political and economic changes. What one can...
Pushing from the Margins: Food in European High Culture
Food’s troubling connection with pleasure questions the primacy of the spiritual over matter, of intellect over emotions and sensations, of soul over body that has informed most of Western Culture. I have just finished reading Leonard Barkan’s new book The Hungry Eye:...
Scanning Old Slides: Memory and Technological Archaeology
Last summer I scanned the pictures I took when I was a journalist. Those fragments of past instants now float in the remote immateriality of a digital cloud. For that, they have acquired a new, different life. There I am, slurping a bowl of noodles. I am covered in...