Stories
Food in Popular Culture: Why does it matter?
Whatever it is that pop culture does to reach it goals, it does it right. It is a spectacle that works, building on dreams and desires. And food is pervasive in contemporary Western pop culture, influencing the way we perceive and represent ourselves as individuals...
Do we really need more Julia Child?
Five episodes into the new HBO Max series about the beginning of Julia Child’s ascent as a media celebrity and the patron goddess of all things food TV, we are left wondering if we really need yet another show about her. It is hard to find anything particularly new or...
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...