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.
Food on the Frontier: First Cow
What counts is not the uniqueness or the fanciness of what one cooks, but the sense of comfort and satisfaction food provides, the consolation, the sensations it brings back, or the fantasies it creates with fragments of memories and emotions. All of which can be...
No Food in the US Presidential Debates
A sense that the food system has overall withstood the COVID-19 shock has prevailed, with little or no discussion about lessons learned and possible improvements or interventions. Food in the US remains a private or, at most, a local matter. As I watch presidential...
What the Real People Eat: Nativist Food and Fascist Aesthetics
Food constitutes an important feature in today’s nativist movements. It prompts us to reflect on how embodied and emotional politics bypass organized ideologies, coming across as spontaneously flowing from the ever bubbling spring of the “real people,” regardless of...
Food, Pleasure, Community: Slow Food and Pope Francis
In their emphasis on personal responsibility and the central role of community Slow Food and Pope Francis appear to be less distant that one may think. Food and pleasure provide a shared terrain to discuss sustainability, biodiversity, and other urgent issues. “There...
Where is Global Brooklyn really from?
with Mateusz Halawa Our edited book Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities (Bloomsbury Academic) is on presale! To celebrate this (for us) exciting milestone, we are sharing a short excerpt from our introduction, where we explain why we chose to...
No Woke-Washing, Please: Race, Food Studies, and Design
It is impossible to ignore the topic of race and structural racism when talking about food systems and food culture. And we should not shy from those conversations, least of all in our classrooms. The worst thing that could happen is for schools and institutions of...
Beans Battles: Goya, the Trumps, and the Power of Food
Food is inevitably political, and the food of immigrants is even more so, as it gets drawn into debates about who belongs and who doesn’t. We have got used to a lot in these past few years, but I must say that last week, when Ivanka Trump tweeted a picture of herself...
Food Systems, Design, Things: Reading Heidegger
Facing the shortcomings in the food system in the past few months, many of us have shared the troubling feeling that something we felt was solid and secure is really not so. Martin Heidegger’s reflection on “average everydayness” and how we navigate it may help us be...
Food, Contagions, and Geopolitics
COVID-19 has severely tested the global food system, revealing its weaknesses. The pandemic has caused surpluses in some countries, due to lack of exports, and the specter of scarcity in others. Concerns about food amplify fears of contagion, connecting personal...
Food and the Fear of Invisible Invaders
Covid-19 has shown how fears of Otherness impinge on our experience of food. The metaphors of infection and contagion become particularly powerful and effective when they are connected to food, which we know penetrates the depths of our body and which can therefore be...