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...
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:...
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...
What culinary tradition is and what it does is still up for grabs. In the post-Covid relaunch, three restaurateurs in northern Poland offer different takes on how to connect their current customers to the past. Fieldwork in Poland continues to be stimulating. Each...
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...
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...
