Foodways

Classicists are, perhaps, most familiar with Theocritus’ use of food as a temptation to romance in Idyll XI, where the Cyclops Polyphemus attempts to woo the “whiter-than-cream-cheese” Galatea by enticing her with the finest milk and an endless bounty of cheese. Elsewhere lovers offer their beloveds the ingestible produce of pastoral labor or, sometimes, the means to produce it: milk-bearing goats, oxen, fruits, herds, pastureland, and various other lures. In exchange, the lovers say that the objects of their affection offer certain food-like temptations of their own, a physique “riper than a pear” or skin “the color of honey.” In my paper I posit the existence of a pastoral-erotic food-driven economy in Theocritus’ Idylls, in which tempting foods serve not just as aphrodisiacs but as elements of an exchange between the lover and the beloved. The admirer trades his supply of food and his means of producing it, obvious symbols of pastoral success and the ability to provide sustenance, for the equally (if not more) tempting food-like charms of the admired. By unraveling Theocritus’ stylized erotic food economy, we may further understand the Hellenistic attitudes that created an inextricable link between the seemingly distinct bodily pleasures of eroticism and eating.

In a qualitative content analysis of The Vegan Society’s quarterly publication, The Vegan, spanning 73 years and nearly 300 issues, the trajectory of one of the world’s most radical and compassionate counter cuisine collectives is presented and critically assessed. The Vegan Society’s history provides a case study on the ways in which social movements negotiate difference and conflict. Specifically, this article highlights the challenges of identity, professionalization, and factionalism across the 20th and 21st centuries. This research also puts into perspective the cultural impact that veganism has had on Western society, namely the dramatic increase in vegan consumers, vegan products, and the normalcy of vegan nutrition.

This article seeks to elevate contemporary Jain voices calling for the adoption of a vegan lifestyle as a sign of solidarity with the transnational vegan movement and its animal rights, environmental protection, and health aspirations. Just as important, however, this article also seeks to
present some of the unique features of contemporary Jain veganism, including, most specifically, Jain veganism as an ascetic practice aimed at the embodiment of non-violence (ahiṃsā), the eradication
(nirjarā) of karma, and the liberation (mokṣa) of the Self (jı̄va). These are distinctive features of Jain veganism often overlooked and yet worthy of our attention. We begin the article with a brief discussion of transnational veganism and Jain veganism’s place within this global movement. This is followed by an overview of Jain karma theory as it appears in the Tattvārtha Sūtra, an authoritative diasporic Jain text. Next, we present two case studies of contemporary Jain expressions of veganism: (1) The
UK-based organization known as “Jain Vegans” and (2) The US-based organization known as “Vegan Jains”. Both organizations have found new opportunities in transnational veganism to practice and embody the virtue of ahiṃsā as well as Jain karma theory. As we will show, though both organizations share the animal, human, and environmental protection aspirations found in transnational veganism, Jain Vegans and Vegan Jains simultaneously promote ahiṃsā to varying degrees in service of the Jain
path to liberation. We conclude the article with a brief reconsideration of Marcus Banks’s diasporic “three tendencies” model to demonstrate how contemporary manifestations of Jain veganism compel us to revisit our understanding of diasporic expressions of Jain religious belief and praxis.

Mrs W.E. Kinsey's "The 'Mems' Own Cookery Book" published in 1920 gives insights to the conditions of colonial cooking in Malaya, explores the state of colonial meals and the skills of local cooks, and provides insights to adaptations of colonial meals and recipes of Malayan food consumed by expatriate families. A brief profile of this talented housewife, her a civil-servant husband based in Malaya and his family is included

Since the very start of the provincial ICH initiative, culinary traditions have been recognized as an important part of the heritage fabric of Newfoundland and Labrador. Much of the province’s history has been based around the catching and processing of codfish, but there are equally historic indigenous and settler traditions around hunting, trapping, gathering wild foods, subsistence agriculture, preserving, smoking, and salting as well as a wide variety of culinary and foodways traditions. As rural economies change, so too have foodways changed.

As more scholars enter the field of Japanese food history, we are all becoming aware of how much more there is to learn. Our progress rests on the availability of primary sources which are plentiful for some topics but nonexistent for others, especially for premodern Japan (before1868). This essay explores several “known unknowns,” instances when my own research on sake, recipes, and restaurants faced unanswered questions due to a lack of sources. I also touch briefly on meat eating in premodern Japan, which is another longstanding issue of debate in food history.

Contribution to the Festschrift for food historian Massimo Montanari. The paper investigates the transformation from unbolted wheat and maslin bread ('brown bread') to bolted and sieved wheat bread ('white bread') between c. 1880 and c.1920.

“Ethnic Diaspora Through the Kitchen: Foodways in the Postcolonial Feminist Discourse of Gurinder Chadha’s What’s Cooking?” The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 4.2 (Fall 2013): 35–53.

In her movie What’s Cooking? (2000), Gurinder Chadha uses foodways as a perfect vehicle for emotional manifestations, attitudes, and dilemmas of four families living in Los Angeles. Chadha incorporates and interweaves various culinary traditions to create an image of multicultural Los Angeles, where members of families belonging to different racial and ethnic minority groups attempt to resist social pressures and preserve their identities and values through their own renditions of Thanksgiving fare. Through the lens of foodways, I want to explore how the movie under analysis employs foodways in presenting cultural heteronormativity, ethnic and racial assimilation, and a single woman’s search for self-definition. Theories of food consumption will furnish an entry point for a discussion of dining rituals in What’s Cooking?, where feasting scenes both represent and subvert gender codes as well as racial, class, and ethnic divisions.

In 2013 ‘traditional Japanese dietary culture’ (washoku) was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Washoku’s predecessor was ‘national people’s cuisine’, an attempt during the Second World War to create a uniform diet for all citizens. Japan’s Cuisines reveals the diversity of Japanese cuisine and explains how Japan’s modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers will discover how tea came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal and how regions on Japan’s periphery are reasserting their distinct food cultures.

    ‘This wise and richly documented study provides an important corrective to the many misconceptions about Japanese food culture. Rath moves skillfully between high cuisine and the great diversity of local foodways to reveal how class cultures, national institutions, and economic change have shaped what Japanese eat and what most people think of as typical Japanese cuisine.’ – Professor Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University

Understanding the procurement, preparation, and consumption of food as a form of communication, critical/cultural scholars approach food and food related activities as texts, asking questions about power, identity, political economy, and culture. The emergent field of critical food studies represents a growing interdisciplinary interest in taking food seriously. Approaching cultural practices as the site of resistance to and incorporation into hegemonic social structures, cultural studies orients us towards questions regarding the politics of food practices with an eye towards social justice. Framed by an awareness of the performativity of cultural practices, both food studies and critical cultural studies engage questions of subjectivity, symbolic meaning, institutional power, identity, and consumption.

This paper investigates seasonal mobility practices on Grand Island on Michigan's Upper Peninsula during the Late Archaic period (c. 5000–2000 B.P.). Evidence for seasonality and food production are drawn from lithic, faunal, and floral data, as well as lipid residue analysis. Comparisons are made with seasonal mobility models for the Late Archaic occupants of the Saginaw Valley, the Terminal Woodland peoples of the Mackinac phase (c. A.D. 750–1000), and the Ojibwa of the subsequent Historic period (c. A.D. 1600s–1900s) living in the Mackinac region. These models propose that people aggregated seasonally during the fall to process foods communally on a relatively large scale, in order to produce food surpluses for winter consumption. I have identified archaeological signatures for the Grand Island sites that are argued to have resulted from fall seasonal aggregation, indicating that food gathering, hunting , fishing, and their subsequent laborious processing and cooking were recurring socioeconomic activities. Therefore, I suggest that Grand Island represented an important place on the landscape for the Late Archaic peoples who repeatedly utilized the island for these fall social and food-processing aggregations. Other seasons were characterized by the dispersal of smaller groups throughout the landscape.

Considerado o cheiro da cidade de Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, o perfume do acarajé -- os bolinhos de feijão fradinho frito em dendê -- são um raiz onipresente do profano e sagrado na cultura alimentar da Bahia. A maioria dos vendedores são mulheres: as "Baianas de Acarajé", que historicamente eram também filhas-de-santo, adeptas da prática religiosa do Candomblé. Estas mulheres e um pequeno grupo de vendedores homens são descritos como o cartão postal de identidade baiana. Desde 2006, o conselho da cidade, autoridades governamentais locais, FIFA e grupos religiosos evangélicos ameaçam esta comida de rua afro-brasileira. A persistência da cultura, apesar de incursões por fora das entidades que se opõem a práticas de matriz africana, é um ponto de inflexão no discurso entre tradição e modernização. Este artigo investiga o impacto de regulamentos municipais, ideologias religiosas conflitantes, e supostas ameaças ao meio ambiente como mecanismo de controle para a produção e consumo de acarajé. Práticas de mídia criam um imaginário cultural e turístico muitas vezes distintos da realidade vivida. A produção, consumo e distribuição de alimentos e as tradições de comensalidade, ou os hábitos alimentares, ‘foodways’ da população, na esfera pública baiana, oferecem um meio para discutir identidade política e questões de gênero, raça e classe.

This essay will investigate the idea of As Baianas de acarajé and acarajé, the black-eyed pea fritter as iconic aspects of Bahian identity, the impact of municipal regulations, conflicting religious ideologies, and alleged threats to the environment as control mechanism for the production and consumption of acarajé. Coca-Cola and McDonalds were key financial sponsors for the 2013 FIFA World Cup. FIFA’s promotional rhetoric and marketing campaign identified the rich creolized culture of Brazil yet privately worked to ban the sale of these foods. Media practices create a cultural and tourist imaginary often distinct from the lived reality. The production, consumption and distribution of food and foodways within the Bahian public sphere offer a means to discuss identity politics, and issues of gender, race and class (Peirce 1991; Bessi and Santiago 2014; Stam 1997).

Consuming native Australian wildlife was an accepted colonial practice that often reflected the tensions and contradictions of the colonial enterprise� From the earliest days of Australian settlement, new arrivals found the need to supplement their meagre food supplies with produce from a strange and curious natural larder that challenged cultural assumptions on what was considered fit and appropriate to eat� The trepidation, disgust and delight with which many colonists viewed the consumption of wildlife mirrored the way in which they viewed the natural environment and its inhabitants� From attempts to 'civilise' native foods through European cooking methods to their outright rejection, colonial attitudes to native produce echo and elucidate the manner in which settlers engaged with the colonial project as a whole� This article has been peer-reviewed� When the First Fleet set sail on its voyage across the oceans, those in charge knew that they bore the weight of responsibility for provisioning the fledgeling colony� James Cook had warned that the new territories produced 'hardly anything fit for Man to eat'� 1 From the moment the new British arrivals landed on the shores of Botany Bay, the procurement of food became an anxious and daily concern� With their meagre supplies rapidly dwindling and becoming inedible due to contamination, rations began to be reduced and the colony faced the peril of starvation� Dysentery and scurvy began to take their toll on the already weakened crew and human cargo, filling the makeshift hospital and keeping the ships' surgeons busy� The land around the settlement provided little of

Late precolonial (c. 800-1500 CE) culinary practices in the northern Caribbean have received limited investigations. Determining foodways has been integral for the study of cultures, yet there has never been a comparison of foodway dynamics in the Caribbean between the Greater Antilles (the presumed origin of people who migrated into The Bahamas) and the Bahama archipelago. The objective of our study was to analyze microbotanical residues (starches) extracted from 45 clay griddles (food preparation platters) to illuminate a partial view of the phytocultural repertoire of this region and explicate variations of the identified culinary practices. The griddles were excavated from three archaeological sites: El Flaco and La Luperona in northwestern Dominican Republic and Palmetto Junction on the western coast of Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands. Regarding the production of plant-based food on griddles, our produced data suggests that the people who lived at El Flaco focused on the production of maize (Zea mays L.) derivatives, La Luperona residents prepared guáyiga/coontie/ zamia (Zamia spp.) food products, and Palmetto Junction ostensibly had a focus on the production of manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz) based foods. This survey of food-ways has exposed particular cultural niches, different adaptation strategies, and associated culinary practices. Resumen Las prácticas culinarias precoloniales (c. 800-1500 CE) en el norte del Caribe han sido investigadas de manera limitida. Determinar lasdimensiones de la alimentación ha sido fundamental en el estudio de las culturas; no obstante, en el Caribe nunca se ha realizado unacomparación de estas dinámicas entre las Antillas Mayores (el atribuido origen migratorio de humanos a las Bahamas) y el archipiélago delas Bahamas. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los residuos microbotánicos (almidones) extraídos Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.

The exploitation of plant resources was an important part of the economic and social strategies of the people of
the Indus Civilisation (c. 3200–1500 BCE). Research has focused mainly on staples such as cereals and pulses, for
understanding these strategies with regards to agricultural systems and reconstructions of diet, with some reference
to ‘weeds’ for crop processing models. Other plants that appear less frequently in the archaeobotanical
record have often received variable degrees of attention and interpretation. This paper reviews the primary
literature and comments on the frequency with which non-staple food plants appear at Indus sites. It argues that
this provides an avenue for Indus archaeobotany to continue its ongoing development of models that move
beyond agriculture and diet to think about how people considered these plants as part of their daily life, with
caveats regarding taphonomy and culturally-contextual notions of function.

Understanding identity aspects of those labeled Genízaro during the late Spanish Colonial period of New Mexico benefits from finer-grained perspectives on what ranges and mixtures of practices persons bearing this casta designation may have performed while preparing cuisine. Materials from the northern frontier site of Casitas Viejas (LA 917) suggest that the closely related households of this fortified plaza may have departed from the less expansive culinary practices of colonial elites while drawing from their multiple social relationships at the various stages of production and consumption of foods. In other words, at different temporal and spatial scales, behaviors reflected in the material record refute historical notions about a creolized community that tried to diminish identity difference within the village. The goal of this work is to explore through the study of faunal remains some of the relationships between foodways and cultural identity in a manner that might assist in some disentangling of the sticky problems archaeologists face in interpreting traces of dynamic past situations of identity from a static material record recovered today.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a " sensual pedagogy " that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

More than just recipes: reading colonial life in the works of Wilhelmina Rawson Abstract: First published in 1878, Mrs Lance Rawson's cookery book and household hints was the first cookbook of its kind to provide recipes and household hints specifically tailored for life in colonial Australia. Over a long and prolific career, Wilhelmina Rawson instructed her readers on more than mere culinary matters, her works were also guides on what a colonial lifestyle should look like. Cookbooks are valuable cultural artefacts that mirror many aspects of the society that has produced them. They not only codify culinary and domestic practices but also codify wider cultural and social practices. Rawson's books, such as The Antipodean cookery book and The Australian enquiry book, provide fascinating insights into life at turn of the century Australia.

One of the most quintessential components of colonial Caribbean foodways is imported saltfish. However, there has been little historical zooarchaeological research addressing the potential roles and values of fish and mollusks in English colonial foodways, particularly the local species. Betty’s Hope plantation in Antigua, British West Indies, has a substantial collection of historical archives called the Codrington Papers, which provides the basis for understanding the site’s historical daily life. This research employs an analysis of these archives compared to the fish and mollusk remains recovered from the site’s zooarchaeological assemblage, with the intention of understanding the extent to which local fish and mollusk resources were utilized. Despite the emphasis on saltfish in the archives and the almost total absence of references to mollusks, the zooarchaeological assemblage was dominated by local tropical fish taxa rather than imported saltfish. This not only informs on the types of fish consumed on the plantation, but also demonstrates selection preferences and practices between the Great House and the middle-class outbuildings that will contribute to the overall understanding of plantation foodways and daily life in the colonial Caribbean.

Various types of labour providers were employed at the Mughal imperial dining spaces and kitchens that provided food for everyday consumption and on the occasion of feasts. These labour service providers can be classified into two broad categories: the imperial officers in charge of the kitchen and allied departments (such as the water and beverages department), and the domestic servants including food servers, cupbearers and cooks. The location of the kitchen and dining spaces determined which gender and what sartorial fashions would be allowed there. The duties performed by all these service providers, the etiquette they were expected to follow, the knowledge, skills and concomitant training they had to acquire were intrinsically linked to the salient notion of food as the conduit for shaping one's innerself. It was believed that the food one consumed affected the body's humoral composition and brought about a qualitative-physiological and psychological-change in the being of the consumer.

The received view in Australian historiography is that although the local environment provided a wealth of foods that had sustained Indigenous Australians for thousands of years, 'in complete ignorance of this, the first European settlers lived through famine as they tried to survive on ship's rations'. Had they shown more respect for the Eora people, and their ways, the colonists would not have been threatened with 'extinction from starvation'. This article challenges this notion by presenting evidence that the newcomers actively utilised native foods.
The early colonists did seek to find out about Eora food sources and practices, and rather than clinging to English foodways in ignorance of indigenous resources, there was much experimentation and consumption of local produce. Until introduced foods were successfully produced and in good supply in the colony, indigenous foods played an important role in the diets of many individuals, and were used by the authorities to supplement official rations when salt provisions were in short supply.

Part of Cornell Department of Architecture graduate student seminar Gastro•porn, a class-curated digital exhibition launched in May 2015. The full exhibition available online as funded and hosted by Cornell's College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (see the attached links to the entire exhibition as well as my essay where, in the latter, you will find links to the videos referenced in the article text available for download here).

In 1931-32 several thousand Russian Mennonite refugees were re-settled in the Gran Chaco at the heart of South America.  They soon found themselves in the middle of the largest inter-state conflict in 20th century Latin American history.  This article explores the settlement of Russian Mennonites on the Paraguayan Chaco frontier during the Chaco War years. These colonists engaged in a range of seemingly contradictory place-making practices – from the agro-environmental and the political to the spiritual and the cultural – that served to solidify their tenuous claim to an unfamiliar and highly contested landscape. Ideas of food security – seen in terms of both production and consumption – linked these diverse exercises. In the Paraguayan Chaco, these former Russian wheat farmers experimented with new crops and foodways. Although pacifists, they supplied the Paraguayan military efforts even as they also sent their crops to Nazi Germany. Finally, as an ethnic group practising endogamy and seeking isolation from their neighbours, they unexpectedly initiated a campaign to evangelise the Chaco's indigenous population centred, in part, on reforming the latter's ‘deficient’ diet.

(Re)Writing sites of food preparation as spaces of women's authority and autonomy Abstract: Women who cook are responsible for the foodways decisions of their family and their community. (Re)writing sites of food preparation, as well as women's roles in the creation of food, allows for a re-examination of the power that women wielded within this sphere. This paper will focus on the findings of food studies scholars as they relate to my creative practice of short story writing where women and their role in food production are given priority. This paper argues that when women make foodways choices, it gives them authority and autonomy. This is because foodways knowledge is an important asset in cultural maintenance. Most importantly, this article will consider the impact of foodways on individual and community ethnic identity where food has been shown to be a highly significant factors in establishing and expressing cultural identity. It argues that women's knowledge of foodways is considered an asset because of this significance to the maintenance of culture, which is especially important to groups that have migrated to a new place. The women of the food studies investigation and within my fiction are the custodians of their cultures, and as the author, I have been required to borrow (or steal) from their store of knowledge in order to write the pieces of fiction but this paper focuses more on the alternative theme of authority than it does on ideas of theft. Biographical note: Debra Wain holds a BA(Hons) in Creative Writing. She is a current PhD candidate and sessional academic in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Debra is undertaking creative practice research into women, food and culture through her creation of a collection of short stories and a ficto-critical exegesis.

Through a study of Soulfood
Equatoriale (2009), a nostalgic collection of culinary short stories by Paris-based Cameroonian writer Leonora Miano (1973–), and her essay “Afropea” (Miano,
Ecrits pour la parole), this article relates culinary literary form to the AfroEuropean subjectivities. Located in the emergent field of foodways, the article examines the juxtaposition “Soulfood” as a signifier of histories of Afrodiasporic dispersal and African- American culinary tradition, with “Equatoriale” denoting the author’s personal trajectory from Cameroon to becoming a naturalized French citizen or AfroEuropean. Using the dual notions of taste and nostalgia to interrogate the affective multiple affiliation created by the translocation of soul food to the Francophone Afropean space, the article frames a nascent Afropean culinary culture as a site of subjectivation created by an entangled network of cultural roots and routes, which transcend cultural and linguistic borders.

This article retraces the legacy of Dutch-settler food customs in Upper Midwestern America since 1847, when the first immigrants arrived there from the Netherlands. It shows that the Dutch heritage has subdivided, running on two separate tracks. The more traditional dishes of European peasant origin, such as hutspot and boerenkool, have undergone some modern Western ingredient substitutions but are still enjoyed by people of Dutch extraction, not only as tasty foods but as symbols of identity. Meanwhile, other foods, such as coleslaws and cookies, have been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream; if they are noticed as Dutch, it is only because they are named or “packaged” as such.