The Food System (Ways of Talking about Food 2)
The term “food system” sounds comfortingly familiar and understandable. System, in the sense of interacting parts, has been used for a long time. Sixteenth-century astronomers talked about systems of...
View ArticleOn My Mind: Grains, Progress, Food Riots, Food Fixes, and More
Grains and Civilization: Good or Bad? A great step forward or not? The agricultural revolution that many of us grew up learning about is being reconsidered. Against the Grain: A…
View ArticleThe Culinary Newsletter’s Golden Age 1980-2000
What glorious decades the 1980s and 1990s were for those of us English speakers with an intellectual interest in food. What fascinated us was the history of food, the food…
View ArticleWhat are regional cuisines? Reflections on Hawaii and other places
“We don’t want generic Mexican cuisine,” friends would often say when they visited us in Mexico. “We want to experience the regional cuisines.” Well, yes, it’s true that there are…
View ArticleSo How Do I Decide What Is or Isn’t a Cuisine?
It’s all very well for me (or anyone else) to wave my hands and say “Local Food is a Cuisine” or “It’s not clear whether the United States had or…
View ArticleFood in World History: A 1995 Course at the University of Hawaii
Why I decided to teach food in world history It’s hard to remember that just twenty five years ago food was not considered a worthy academic subject, so it was…
View ArticleLooking for the Origin of the Term “Food System”
[Until the 1970s and 80s, the term “food system,” which now seems so indispensable, was rarely used. In March 2017 I posted on the possible origins of the term. What…
View ArticleWhy so many foodie institutions fail: or thoughts on the Oxford Symposium and...
Every time I poke about on the shelves and in the file drawers of my study, I run across the remains of failed “foodie” institutions, using the foodie here as…
View ArticleJump Right In: A New Tool for Historical Research Using Cookbooks
On July 10 of this year 2020, a huge, open-access editable cook book data base—The Sifter–went on line. Half a century and more than half a lifetime has passed…
View ArticleA Small Cautionary Tale about Cookbooks and Authenticity
When I moved to Mexico in the mid 1990s, I took a series of cooking classes from a very charming and knowledgeable Mexican woman. She started each class by passing…
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