Food and Culture
Until recently, producing, cooking, and eating were not a common topic for civic debates, let alone polite conversations and educated discussions. These aspect of everyday life used to run almost invisibly in the background, except in the case of crisis. That is no longer the case. Featured in media, popular culture, advertising, literature, and film, food is now visible in cultural considerations, social movements, and political negotiations. The urgency of these phenomena have also brought food into academia. Since the late 1980s, food studies have matured into a field of interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research and teaching that explores biological, cultural, social, economic, technical and political issues concerning the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food in its material and immaterial aspects. It is increasingly evident that the study of food can provide us with the tools to approach complex problems while imagining innovative scenarios of what our daily lives could be. It can support our choices as consumers and our agency as citizens. With a background in food journalism, I have always been attuned to the cultural and social undercurrents that shape and shift the global food system. Over the years I have researched and published about food in popular culture, in contemporary media, in film,and in political debates. In this page I will share updates on my research projects and my thoughts on current issues.
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...
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...
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...
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...