Research
Fabio Parasecoli’s work ranges from food studies and the cultural politics of food heritage to food design and food business. His research interests extend to the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Click on the following links to explore his research projects:
Global Brooklyn
Food Heritage
Food in Poland
Food + Ethnography + Design
Workshops
Curatorial Work
Food and Culture
Talks, Conferences, Events
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Food in a Korean Drama: Imagining North Korea in Crash Landing on You
In the Korean drama on Netlix, food is used to portray a fictional North Korea that arguably has not much to share with the real one but whose apparent function is to run a commentary on South Korean consumer culture. A lot has been written on Squid Game, the Korean...
Memories of Flavors: Negotiating the Past in post-Socialist Europe
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...
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...
How to cook tradition? Three interpretations of Polish food
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...
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....