Stories
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...
Searching for Italy: CNN, Travel, and Food
Almost one year into the pandemic, Stanley Tucci’s new show on CNN, Searching for Italy, provides pleasant succor without wallowing too much in pastoral fantasies or good savage characterizations. What can be better than enjoying a stroll in the creative, buzzing mess...
What does Global Brooklyn look like?
The photo gallery that accompanies the Global Brooklyn book is now online! There are many reasons that convinced us to launch the gallery. Visual digital media have supported the global diffusion of Global Brooklyn, its looks, and its feel, from fonts to the plating...
The Present and Future of Food and Technology
Illustration by Pablo Delcan. Here is a brief excerpt of my article in The Food Issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which I reflect on how the impact of technology on the food system depends on political choices and the priorities we embrace as a society. The issue...