Stories
Truly Texas Mexican: Food Heritage Across Borders
In the documentary, food becomes art activism, a way to stay healthy, happy, and connected to the land. Ingredients, dishes, objects, and techniques turn into tools to reclaim an identity that is constantly contested and put down. I have been following Adán Medrano’s...
Food Generations: Pierogi, Culinary Heritage, and Family Legacy in Poland
All pictures: courtesy of the Goethe-Institut This film on culinary heritage highlights the role cooking and eating together play in the survival of material and immaterial culture and in the development of an inclusive and porous sense of identity that is based on...
Visual Food Heritage: African American Cuisine and Netflix’s High on the Hog
How can food heritage be identified and safeguarded when the powerful and winners in history have conspired to erase it, or at least to discount its prominence? What’s the value of cuisine when it becomes a tangible symbol or resistance and ingenuity? These are some...
It’s a Long Time Coming: Top Chef and the African Diaspora Food
The debates about race and racism that have shaken the US may have started influencing food TV and the representations of world cuisines. Food TV won’t be able to keep itself much longer out of the debate about race and racism in America. A sign of what may be coming...
Listen to your Vegetables (and Eat your Parents!): ‘Waffles and Mochi’ on Netflix
The show, by the Obama's Higher Ground production company, assumes that its young viewers have already been exposed to quite a few culinary experiences or at least they are quite open to experimentation, unless the real audience is their foodie millennial parents....
Looking for exposure: Gastrodiplomacy in Central and Eastern Europe
Central and Eastern European countries have been producing books about their cuisines as a form of gastrodiplomacy. Will such initiatives succeed in giving more visibility to these food cultures? For those like me who were introduced to Ukrainian cuisine (or, at...